QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

eached if measurement is carried out. It is truly strange that real measurements reinforce the
probabilities that quantum mechanics predicts.
Whether the abstract quantum-mechanical state function describes a real quantum object, a world
of possibilities, knowledge of the observer or anything else, this mathematical construction
connects concrete observations of real phenomena in many ways which are impossible to
comprehend within the framework of reality provided by classical physics. These confusioncausing
and difficult-to-interpret features of quantum mechanics are examined more closely in
the following section.
4.2..2. Discontinuity and wave-particle dualism
In classical terms, the world was assumed to be made up of separate mechanically interacting
objects which had different objective properties such as size, mass or velocity. In principle, these
properties could be assigned any values, and changes in them from one state to another were
believed to take place in a continuous manner through all the intermediate stages. The discovery
that the interaction of matter and radiation was connected with a new universal constant,
Planck’s constant h, set a limit on the minimum size of any effect and at the same time made
some atomic particle states discontinuous, i.e. quantised.
In quantum mechanics there is a certain probability that an electron in a hydrogen atom, for
example, can be found in one position, and there is also a certain probability of it being in
another position. Electrons no longer have orbits but physicists often speak of ”electron clouds”
that are of different sizes and shapes. These configurations are known as quantum states. 512
Different states are associated with different energies. When an atom’s energy changes, the
electron makes a transition between two different states. In doing this, the atom emits or absorbs
a light quantum (or photon), whose energy corresponds to the difference between the energy
states. The atom’s transference from one stationary state to another cannot however be visualised
in space-time. The change is usually presented as taking place in a quantum jump, in which
512 Morris 1997, 93. Subatomic particles are in general considered to be in mixtures of states. One can speak of the
probability of a subatomic particle being in this or that state. Not only is an electron in many different places at once,
it can simultaneously occupy an infinite number of different energy states.
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