QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

Democritus’ atomic doctrine, which had been rediscovered during sudies of antique literature,
was a source of inspiration to Galileo 30 years before it began to gain currency with other
thinkers. Galileo did not, however, regard the movement of atoms as random, since to him all
parts of the universe were ruled by laws. In some of his writings, Galileo employed expressions
used by Epicurus, and from Democritus he adopted the concept of primary and secondary
qualities. The primary properties of things such as size, shape, number and motion had their
source in the properties of atoms and could be measured. The secondary, qualitative properties
such as colour, taste and odour were considered to be subjective phenomena of secondary
importance that arose in the human sense organs and were dependent on the primary qualities.
When the real world was simply a succession of atomic motions in mathematical continuity, man
was in a way eliminated from it. Only the primary qualities were real and our knowledge of
objects was mediated by the secondary qualities arising in the senses. 191
Galileo is generally regarded as the father of natural science. In his time, Galileo’s proposition
that the behaviour of material objects could be explained by referring only to physical and
mechanistic factors represented a completely new way of thinking: quantitative relationships did
not occupy a predominant position in peripatetic philosophy. In contrast to Plato and Pythagoras,
who also highlighted the role of mathematics, the object of research for natural scientists of the
modern time has clearly been, as it was for Aristotle, the visible world and the changes
observable in it. 192 By analysing the quantitative and measurable changes taking place in space
and time, natural science has truly been able to discover general laws which control phenomena.
In a brief period Galileo was able to refute experimentally many of the aspects of Aristotle’s
physics which had been criticised but not empirically disproved by many philosophers.
Observations and repeatable experiments revealed laws of nature which could be stated in exact
mathematical form. When portraying the epoch-making characteristics of the Galilean method, it
has been repeatedly pointed out that as a consequence of the new natural science, ‘natural laws’
no longer meant “qualitates occultae” which were derived from the hidden qualities of things,
but dependent relationships governed by laws which could be stated as mathematical
190 Dijksterhuis 1986, 348-352.
191 White 1998, 38-39. Trusted 1991, 52. Collingwood 1960, 94-102. Burtt 1980, 83-84, 98-99. Although Galileo’s
thou ghts are reconciliable with the fundamental principle of the mechanistic interpretation of nature his conceptions
of the void form a curious blend of ideas originating from medieval physics. His idea of the cosmos as a beautifully
and efficiently-organized whole was perhaps too vivid for him to be satisfied by the notion of atoms in an infinite
void. Dijksterhuis 1986, 419-424.
192 Trusted 1991, 61-62.
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