QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

question of whether explanation once again has room for the sophisticated ideas concerning the
nature of matter proposed by Plato and Aristotle.
The deliberations undertaken by ancient thinkers concerning the basic substance of reality and
its division are once again topical. Is Being fundamentally a single and unchanging whole, or
does it consist of many different parts? Is it temporary or eternal? How are movement and
change born? It is my belief that sorting through the the basic ideas and divisions employed by
the antique natural philosophers can make a substantial contribution to the interpretation of
quantum mechanics. Many perplexing problems and phenomena in modern physic such as
indeterminism, irreversibile historicism and non-locality which cannot be explained in the
mechanistic-deterministic framework of reality might be much simpler to understand in
Aristotle's world, in which happenings are unfolding and eruption based on the guidance of
timeless form.
In spite of the many victories of classical physics quantum mechanics has shown that physics is
no longer able to work exclusively with differential equations which describe changes in position
of particles which take place in time and space, it needs multi-dimensional and complex vector
spaces whose symmetrical properties are linked to the laws of conservation and the invariance
perceived in nature. On the basis of quantum mechanics, it is justifiable to doubt whether all the
types of change and happening possible in nature can truly be visualised as the movement of
bodies through space. Scientific explanations are usually seen as ruling out anything but material
causes, but on the basis of quantum mechanics, it is possible to ask whether it is reasonable to
stay with effective material causes when the most important term on which the corresponding
theory is based, the ‘wave function’, cannot be visualised in space-time and its contents cannot
be entirely reduced to the material world.
The abstract concept of state in quantum mechanics has usually been visualised as a probability
wave. Even though the ontological interpretation of such waves continues to be a subject of
dispute, on the basis of current knowledge it is justifiable to claim in accordance with Werner
Heisenberg that what modern science says is matter is a description of different structures and
rhythmical movements which according to Greek terminology could be understood as a theory of
125
The usefulness of the ideas of Aristotle and Plato in the interpretation of quantum mechanics is further discussed
in Section 5.1.
55