QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

quantum mechanics required a radical renewal of earlier ways of thinking, and each of them was
striving, for their own part, to understand and analyze the new and unexpected situation resulting
from the failure of the conception of reality which had been dominant for more than 200 years.
According to Pauli, renewal of the conception of reality was the most important task of the age.
Even though he was the only one of the Copenhangen group who was clearly searching for a
new ontologically orientated model in the spirit of traditional system-building philosophy 578 ,
none of the developers of the interpretation showed any interest in questioning the primary goal
of such an enterprise.
The Copenhagen group were very well aware that the objective description of reality in classical
physics had become inadequate since wave-particle dualism made it impossible to clearly
separate matter and fields from one another, the principle of uncertainty limited the possibilities
of obtaining a precise knowledge of a particle’s mechanical state or trajectory, and measurement
appeared to be interactive, so that because of the quantum of action the possible results and the
future behaviour of the system could not be analysed in an unambiguous manner. The collapse
of determinism was a surprise which not a single physicist had apparently expected. 579 Even
though indeterminism and objective chance had been a subject of much discussion in the 1800s
in connection with theories of probability, physicists clearly believed that statistical laws were
reducible to underlying deterministic events. Philosophers such as C.S. Peirce (1839-1914) were
better equipped to rejected the doctrine of necessity. He based his logic of inductive reasoning on
statistical stability believing in a universe in which laws of nature are at best approximate and
evolve out of random processes. 580
When the ideas of classical mechanics were incapable of explaining new experimentally
observed phenomena, the Copenhagen group realised that they would be forced to abandon
physicists’ earlier attempts to describe natural phenomena as completely deterministic and
observer independent events taking place in space-time. The circumstances turned them into
philosophers almost against their will. They did not lack the courage to move outside the area of
their own specialities and search for new solutions and orientations in those fundamental
578
An outline of Pauli’s ideas will be given in Section 4.3.5. For more detail, see i.a. K.V. Laurikainen 1988 and
1997.
579
March 1957, 14.
580
Hacking 1990, 200-215, Popper 1972, 212-213. Popper appraises Peirce as one of the greatest philosophers of
all time. Peirce was the first post-Newtonian physicist and philosopher who dared to adopt the view that to some
degree all ”clocks” are ”clouds”. In his book, Hacking presents a thorough examination of how determinism was
subverted by the laws of chance. For early 17th-century ideas about probability, induction, and statistical inference,
see Hacking 1975.
220