Philosophy of Physical Science, Misc

This chapter gives an overview of the various themes and issues discussed in the volume. It includes summaries of all chapters and places the contributions, some of which are part of a critical conversation format, in the context of the larger literature and debates.

In this new edition, a hypothesis is put forward for the first time to unify the Big Bang theory and the evolutionary theory by showing both events following the same set of fundamental interrelationships. As the evolution of life is a part of the evolutions of the universe, these two events express many fundamental similarities (this is self-similarity, which means a part of the system is similar to the whole system). Based on the same principle, the evolution of multicellular organisms, (...) social evolution, development of the human body, and human technological development are all a part of the evolution of life. Thus, they all follow the same set of rules that all life follows and, at the fundamental level, the interrelationships that the Big Bang follows. Therefore, all of these events follow the fundamental interrelationships and express fundamental similarities. In other words, all these events are the specific expressions of those fundamental interrelationships – the fundamental mechanism that governs everything in the universe. -/- Upon these interrelationships, new approaches to study social development and technological development are employed. By using the knowledge of the medical sciences, including the structures (anatomy and histology), functions (physiology) and development (embryology) of a human body; knowledge of the evolution of life; and the concept of fundamental interrelationships, we can see the future beyond the horizon. Using the nerve system in parallel as a model, we can comprehensively understand the development of the information revolution. Based upon parallel interrelationships, we can see that the transformation of society due to individuals’ power increase brought by new technologies bears great similarities with the transformation from the solid state of ice to the liquid state of water due the individual molecules’ kinetic energy increase. -/- As the fundamental interrelationships govern social evolution, all events in human civilisation are simply specific expressions of those rules in which significant social events not only changed the course of civilisation but left so many unanswered mysteries: how did the Greeks build such brilliant civilisations; why did the Scientific Revolution originate from the West rather than the East such as in China; why did the Chinese society remain in feudalism for such a long time while the Western society had evolved into a higher level – industrialization and modern society; why did the Chinese civilisation fall from its ancient glory in the modern time but rapidly re-rise again to a super power in the last few decades? All these mysteries remain unanswered because of the lack of fundamental laws of physics and evolutionary biology used in the traditional methodologies of social science. As the fundamental laws of physics are the fundamental mechanism for everything and these mysteries are a part of the evolution of life, the fundamental laws of physics and evolutionary biology are used in tackling these unanswered issues. For example, upon parallel relationship, Chinese civilisation is compared with the transition from unicellular organisms to multicellular organisms. From how unicellular organisms aggregate and evolve new rules to organise themselves, we can much better understand how human individuals aggregate to form societies and evolve new cultures to organise themselves in social evolution. Furthermore, transformation from the solid state of ice to the liquid state of water is used to analyze Chinese social evolution. With these approaches the mysteries in Chinese civilisation have been answered. -/- Ultimately, all these discussions in this book have demonstrated that the Interrelationships Model has unified social science with natural science, and furthermore, science with philosophy. This is an important attempt in answering the most fundamental and intriguing question of all – the Theory of Everything. -/- Currently, this book is for FREE download. (shrink)

In this paper, we challenge a wide-spread assumption among philosophers that contemporary physics supports physical state monism. This is the claim that the causal powers of a system supervene upon the ‘lower-level’ laws and the lower-level state of the cosmos (as represented by our ‘best physics’). On this view, it makes sense to ignore a macroscopic system’s higher-level properties in determining its causal powers, since any higher-level powers are merely artifacts of our special interests. We argue that this assumption is (...) common both to microphysicalism, which carves the cosmos into a set of microscopic constituents, and priority monism, which posits a single cosmic substance, but is incompatible with any form of physical pluralism that attributes irreducibly higher-level powers to entities of intermediate scales. We consider a number of case studies in contemporary physics which fail to support the thesis of state monism. We argue that the causal powers of many systems are (determined by) higher-level, macroscopic properties that are neither reducible nor weakly emergent, and that contemporary physics is compatible with some kind of pluralism that affirms that these entities are robustly real. A pluralist ontology is likely to have implications for discussions of free will and agency. (shrink)

In this volume I offer a compact history of the concepts of probability and statistics as well as a review of the most relevant interpretations of these notions. In the second part of the volume I explore the meaning of probability, statistics and their interpretations with respect to the developement of physical theories - from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics. -/- (ISBN: 978-8889891322).

Experiments in particle physics have hitherto failed to produce any significant evidence for the many explicit models of physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) that had been proposed over the past decades. As a result, physicists have increasingly turned to model-independent strategies as tools in searching for a wide range of possible BSM effects. In this paper, we describe the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SM-EFT) and analyse it in the context of the philosophical discussions about models, theories, and (bottom-up) (...) effective field theories. We find that while the SM-EFT is a quantum field theory, assisting experimentalists in searching for deviations from the SM, in its general form it lacks some of the characteristic features of models. Those features only come into play if put in by hand or prompted by empirical evidence for deviations. Employing different philosophical approaches to models, we argue that the case study suggests not to take a view on models that is overly permissive because it blurs the lines between the different stages of the SM-EFT research strategies and glosses over particle physicists' motivations for undertaking this bottom-up approach in the first place. Looking at EFTs from the perspective of modelling does not require taking a stance on some specific brand of realism or taking sides in the debate between reduction and emergence into which EFTs have recently been embedded. (shrink)

As timely renovation of artificial ideology about authenticity of nature in proportion to contemporaneous historical background of remarkable highlight of microcosmic configuration of matter, “Homogenous Cosmos Originated from Unique Genesis” is innovative cosmos redefinition and thoroughly coherent PNT dynamics about universal existence & motion as spontaneous occurrence in the nature of essence of matter in a class by itself, which is radically extended from newly highlighted factuality that “discretionary particles in cosmos are mutually convertible” as lineal logic system based on (...) unique assumable precondition of Homogenous cosmos originated from unique genesis postulate. (shrink)

Modern science generally assumes that the same laws of logic apply to mechanical, chemical and biological entities alike because they are all ultimately material objects. This may seem to be so obvious that there would be no need to validate it -- experimentally or logically. In this article we would like to critically examine this assumption and show that from an experiential/observational level, as well as from a rational/logical level, it is not valid. This becomes apparent, for instance, when we (...) consider the simple observation in which we distinguish animate from inanimate objects: those objects that seem to spontaneously move themselves and those that move only when impelled by some applied force outside or beyond the object. This distinction may be valid at the macroscopic level more than at the level of theoretical atomic particles. Thus the detailed nature of spontaneous movement must also be understood. (shrink)

Williams and J. Fraser have recently argued that effective field theory methods enable scientific realists to make more reliable ontological commitments in quantum field theory than those commonly made. In this paper, I show that the interpretative relevance of these methods extends beyond the specific context of QFT by identifying common structural features shared by effective theories across physics. In particular, I argue that effective theories are best characterized by the fact that they contain intrinsic empirical limitations, and I extract (...) from their structure one central interpretative constraint for making more reliable ontological commitments in different subfields of physics. While this is in principle good news, this constraint still raises a challenge for scientific realists in some contexts, and I bring the point home by focusing on Williams’s and J. Fraser’s defense of selective realism in QFT. (shrink)

A mechanism for life after death is given.

This essay attempts to demonstrate that it is doubtful if Galileo's famous thought experiment concerning falling bodies in his 'Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences' (Galileo 1954: 61-64) actually does succeed in proving that Aristotle was wrong in claiming that "bodies of different weight […] move […] with different speeds which stand to one another in the same ratio as their weights," (Galileo 1954: 61). (Part I); and further that it is likewise doubtful that that argument does or even can establish (...) Galileo's own famous 'Law of Falling Bodies,' viz., that regardless of their weight all bodies fall with the same speed. (Part II). (shrink)

Este trabajo consiste en un análisis de la tesis expuesta en el artículo de 1980 “Do the laws of physics state the facts?” de Nancy Cartwright, según la cual las leyes fundamentales de la física no “describen los hechos” porque, respecto de ellas, verdad y explicatividad se excluyen mutuamente. El texto fue luego republicado como tercer ensayo de su libro How the Laws of Physics Lie (1981), del que Mauricio Suárez afirma que el “trade-off” entre verdad y explicación es su (...) “tesis central”. El problema abordado es propio de la filosofía de la ciencia: cómo deben interpretarse o entenderse las leyes teóricas. Específicamente, si deben considerarse descripciones de hechos (es decir, literalmente, en el sentido de que existe una realidad con independencia de las leyes mismas y que las características de la realidad pueden ser representadas mediante el lenguaje: que tienen valor de verdad) o cumplen otra función dentro del conocimiento científico. El artículo de Cartwright estudia el caso del papel que cumplen las leyes fundamentales de la física cuando forman parte de las explicaciones por cobertura legal del tipo denominado por John Stuart Mill “por composición de causas”. Analiza la explicación de la atracción gravitatoria que hay entre dos objetos en un sistema físico en el que están presentes, además de las fuerzas gravitatorias, fuerzas eléctricas. Afirma que en ella la ley de la teoría de Newton tomada individualmente no describe lo que ocurre, no es verdadera. Pero no porque sea falsa sino porque su función o “rol” no consiste en “describir hechos” sino en ser parte de explicaciones científicas. Pero este argumento de la filósofa de la escuela de Stanford presenta dificultades semánticas, como el uso con dos sentidos diferentes del término teórico “fuerza”. Asimismo, es problemático que asuma que los hechos físicos son observables. Y no es correcta la afirmación de que una ley científica “se hace verdadera”, ni que “explica” hechos singulares, ni que “describe” en una explicación. (shrink)

This survey covers some of the main philosophical debates raised by the framework of effective field theories during the last decades. It is centered on three issues: whether effective field theories underpin a specific realist picture of the world, whether they support an anti-reductionist picture of physics, and whether they provide reasons to give up the ultimate aspiration of formulating a final and complete physical theory. Reviewing the past and current literature, we argue that effective field theories do not give (...) convincing reasons to adopt a particular stance towards these speculative issues. They hold good prospects for asking ontologically perspicuous and sensible questions about currently accessible domains. With respect to more fundamental questions, however, the only certainty is provisional and instrumental: effective theories are currently indispensable for conducting fruitful scientific research. (shrink)

This book contextualizes David Hume's philosophy of physical science, exploring both Hume's background in the history of early modern natural philosophy and its subsequent impact on the scientific tradition.

According to Einstein, a universal time does not exist. But what if time is different than what we think of it? Cosmic Microvawe Background Radiation was accepted as a reference for a universal clock and a new time concept has been constructed. According to this new concept, time was tackled as two-dimensional having both a wavelength and a frequency. What our clocks measure is actually a derivation of the frequency of time. A relativistic time dilation actually corresponds to an increase (...) in the wavelength of time. At the point where time wavelength and time frequency is equal, where light is positioned, quantum-world and macro- world are seperated. Gravity was redefined with respect to time and the new two dimensional time fabric of the universe was speculated to be the source of dark energy causing the universe to expand. According to this new point of view quantum realm and macro-world can be better understood. This new time concept provide a basis for our understanding of quantum gravity and provide the long-sought answers to well known problems of it. A prediction of the presented theory is that the universe will expand at various rates at different regions due to the fact that particular surroundings will create different gravities and cause a different gravity- time wavelength effect yielding various time delays for calculating this rate of expansion. (shrink)

The main concept of quantum field theory is the conviction that all the phenomena in the universe are created by the underlying structure of the quantum fields. Fields represent dynamical spatial properties that can be described with the help of geometrical concepts. Therefore it is possible to describe the mathematical origin of the structure of the creating fields and show the mathematical origin of the law of conservation of energy, Planck’s constant and the constant speed of light within a non-local (...) universe. (shrink)

(March 2019) UNBELIEVALBE similar ideas, UNBELIEVABLE similar framework of the article on “quantum mechanics” written by Proietti et al (2019) with my EDWs (2002-2008) -/- Gabriel Vacariu -/- The article that I investigate in this section is -/- (2019) Experimental rejection of observer-independence in the quantum world -/- Massimiliano Proietti,1 Alexander Pickston,1 Francesco Graffitti,1 Peter Barrow,1 Dmytro Kundys,1 Cyril Branciard,2 Martin Ringbauer,1, 3 and Alessandro Fedrizzi1 at arXiv:1902.05080v1 [quant-ph] 13 Feb 2019 -/- In the article written by Proietti et al. (...) (2019), there are UNBLELIEVABLE similar ideas to my ideas (2002-2008); in fact, the framework of this article seems UNBELIEVABLE similar to my framework, the EDWs perspective!!!! I applied my EDWs to quantum mechanics (getting micro-EW, wave-EW), to Einstein’s special relativity getting EDWs for those two observers (one in the train and one on the pavement), to microparticles and macro-objects (EDWs), etc. -/- The authors of this article work in an UNBELIEVABLE similar framework (see below details), and applied this framework to quantum mechanics referring to the relationship between two observers and the microparticle. In this way, they get EDWs for the same microparticle. However, I have done exactly the same application to Einstein’s special relativity. I emphasize that it would be necessary my EDWs to apply this framework to the same particle. In my book 2014, if the reader replaces the macro-objects with the microparticle, there would obtain exactly the EDWs for the microparticle that can be found in this article! Amazing it is the fact that the authors, having no background in philosophy and having no new theory on quantum mechanics, have discovered the existence of observer-independent “facts of the world” (that are exactly my EDWs!!!). Obviously, the authors are geniuses like sean carroll, markus Gabriel, carolo rovelli, and so many from my manuscript referring to UNBELIEVABLE similarities (see the bibliography at the end of this article!) . (shrink)

Why microscopic objects exhibit wave properties (are delocalized), but macroscopic do not (are localized)? Traditional quantum mechanics attributes wave properties to all objects. When complemented with a deterministic collapse model (Quantum Stud.: Math. Found. 3, 279 (2016)) quantum mechanics can dissolve the discrepancy. Collapse in this model means contraction and occurs when the object gets in touch with other objects and satisfies a certain criterion. One single collapse usually does not suffice for localization. But the object rapidly gets in touch (...) with other objects in a short time, leading to rapid localization. Decoherence is not involved. (shrink)

The model of special relativity is built in the article. Within the framework of the model, formulas of special relativity are obtained and their philosophical and physical meaning is revealed.

The History of scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza is often called upon to support three theses: first, that Descartes had a dogmatic notion of systematic knowledge, and therefore of physics; second, that the hypothetical epistemology of physics which spread during the xviith century was the result of a general sceptical crisis; third, that this epistemology was more successful in England than in France. I reject these three theses: I point first to the tension in Descartes’ works between the ideal of (...) a completely certain science and a physics replete with hypotheses; further, I argue that the use of hypotheses by mechanical philosophers cannot be separated from their conception of physics; finally I show that, at the end of the xviith century, physicists in France as well as in England spoke through hypotheses and I examine different ways of explaining this shared practice. Richard H. Popkin’s book serves therefore as a starting point for insights into the general problem: to what extent and for what reasons some propositions in physics have been presented as hypotheses in the xviith century? (shrink)

This continues from Part 1. It is shown how an intensional interpretation of physics object languages can be formalised, and how a syntactic compositional time reversal operator can subsequently be defined. This is applied to solve the problems used as examples in Part 1. A proof of a general theorem that such an operator must be defineable is sketched. A number of related issues about the interpretation of theories of physics, including classical and quantum mechanics and classical EM theory are (...) discussed. (shrink)

In this paper I shall argue in Section II that two of the standard arguments that have been put forth in support of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity do not support that theory and are quite compatible with what might be called an updated and perhaps even an enlightened Newtonian view of the Universe. This view will be presented in Section I. I shall call it the neo-Newtonian Theory, though I hasten to add there are a number of things in (...) it that Newton would not accept, though perhaps Galileo might have. Now there may be other arguments and/or pieces of empirical evidence which support the Special Theory of Relativity and cast doubt upon the neo-Newtonian view. Nevertheless, the two that I am going to examine are usually considered important. It might also be claimed that the two arguments that I am going to examine have only heuristic value. Perhaps this is so but they are usually put forward as supporting the Special Theory and refuting the neo-Newtonian Theory. Again I must stress that it is not my aim to cast any doubt on the Special Theory of Relativity nor on Einstein. His Special Theory and his General Theory stand at the zenith of human achievement. My only aim is to cast doubt on the assumption that the two arguments I examine support the Special Theory. (shrink)

This book discusses the notion that quantum gravity may represent the "breakdown" of spacetime at extremely high energy scales. If spacetime does not exist at the fundamental level, then it has to be considered "emergent", in other words an effective structure, valid at low energy scales. The author develops a conception of emergence appropriate to effective theories in physics, and shows how it applies (or could apply) in various approaches to quantum gravity, including condensed matter approaches, discrete approaches, and loop (...) quantum gravity. (shrink)

Anhand der genaueren Analyse von Newtons experimentum crucis und der Argumentation, die er auf dieses Experiment stützt, sowie Goethes Kritik hieran sollen im Folgenden zwei verbreitete Vorurteile revidiert werden: -/- 1. Newton ist kein Dogmatiker, der methodische Ansprüche vertritt, die er nicht einlösen kann, sondern gründet seinen Anspruch, experimentelle Beweise führen zu können, auf einer vorbildlichen Methodologie kausaler Erklärungen, was seine Kritiker allerdings übersehen. 2. Goethe ist kein Antiwissenschaftler, der einen einzigartigen Kontrapunkt zur vorherrschenden wissenschaftlichen Tradition bildet, sondern steht inmitten (...) traditioneller Auffassungen zur Farbenlehre, deren experimentelle und methodologische Grundlagen bezüglich eines Erklärungsanspruches denen Newtons unterlegen sind. (shrink)

In their recent book Every Thing Must Go, Ladyman and Ross claim: (i) Physics is analytically complete since it is the only science that cannot be left incomplete. (ii) There might not be an ontologically fundamental level. (iii) We should not admit anything into our ontology unless it has explanatory and predictive utility. In this discussion note I aim to show that the ontological commitment in implies that the completeness of no science can be achieved where no fundamental level exists. (...) Therefore, if claim requires a science to actually be complete in order to be considered as physics,, and if Ladyman and Ross's “tentative metaphysical hypothesis ... that there is no fundamental level” is true,, then there simply is no physics. Ladyman and Ross can, however, avoid this unwanted result if they merely require physics to ever strive for completeness rather than to already be complete. (shrink)

Popular interest in the progress of physical science has increased very rapidly in the last few years. Perhaps the spectacular ‘mysteries’ of wireless and the intriguing paradoxes of the theory of relativity are the chief causes. For every home now has its Magic Box—a piece of pure physics; there is not a familiar thing in it, not even that sine qua non of all things that ‘work’—a wheel, only mysterious parts called condensers, grid-leaks, inductances, and thermionic valves. And surely, when (...) a Sunday newspaper produces a facsimile page of Einstein’s recent paper in German containing abstruse tensor equations, reverence for the mathematical physicist is nearing its zenith. (shrink)

This book successfully achieves to serve two different purposes. On the one hand, it is a readable physics-based introduction into the philosophy of science, written in an informal and accessible style. The author, himself a professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame and active in the philosophy of science for almost twenty years, carefully develops his metatheoretical arguments on a solid basis provided by an extensive survey along the lines of the historical development of physics. On the other (...) hand, this book supplies one long argument for Cushing´s own attitude in the philosophy of science. While former studies of the author, from which this book draws in part, focused each on one special episode in the history of science, this book gathers case material from many different parts of physics and epochs. The main goal of this book is ”to impress upon the reader the essential and ineliminable role that philosophical considerations have played in the actual practice of science” (p. xv). The book is beautifully edited and produced; it contains a wealth of illustrative figures, well-chosen short quotations from original sources and contemporary commentators (some longer quotations are relegated in an appendix at the end of a chapter) and does not dispense with insightful mathematical arguments in the main text (some advanced deductions are, however, relegated in the appendices). It contains nine parts, whereas only the first and the last one are exclusively devoted to philosophical issues. The seven remaining parts, each subdivided into three chapters, centre around one major episode (a theory, a world view, etc.) in the history of physics. The author presents this material in a clear and philosophically unbiased way so that also readers who do not share Cushing’s subsequent philosophical conclusions will find this inspiring book extremely useful. Part 1 (”The scientific enterprise”) discusses some traditional (”objectivist”) views concerning the status of scientific knowledge, ”the” scientific method, and the relation.... (shrink)

This paper analyses the fraught relationship between physics and the ‘occult sciences’ in the decades around 1900. For some, there was no relationship at all; for others there was a relationship but they did not agree on what it looked like. Many physicists converged with spiritualists, theosophists, and others in interpreting X-rays, the electrical theory of matter, and other aspects of the ‘new’ physics as powerful ways of rendering psychic and occult effects scientifically more understandable. However, they were opposed by (...) commentators on physics who agreed that there was a relationship between the ‘new’ physics and psychical research but that these were two manifestations of a worrying drift of physics into metaphysics and religion. More redoubtable critics were the psychologists who denied that physicists had the experience or experimental skill to cope reliably with the psycho-physical phenomena encountered in psychical research. This paper shows that physicist–psychical researchers were content to ally the ‘new’ physics with religion because it helped vanquish awkward associations with materialism. They also tried to justify the value of their experimental skills by appealing to their expertise in investigating subtle physical effects and ability to create tests that respected the delicate conditions of séances.Keywords: Physics; Psychical research; Ether; Occult; Psychology; Fin-de-siècle. (shrink)

The introduction of electron microscopy profoundly altered biomedical research, providing a tool for a more detailed but at the same time a spatially and temporally more restricted visual analysis. Examining the case study of Golgi apparatus research in the 1950s and 1960s, it will be shown how microscopists handled these challenges, and how these confrontations modified the general concept of cellular organization. This will also shed light on the artifact debate and on the question of scientific realism in the field (...) of microscopy. (shrink)

We are used to talking about the “structure” posited by a given theory of physics, such as the spacetime structure of relativity. What is “structure”? What does the mathematical structure used to formulate a theory tell us about the physical world according to the theory? What if there are different mathematical formulations of a given theory? Do different formulations posit different structures, or are they merely notational variants? I consider the case of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian classical mechanics. I argue that, (...) contrary to standard wisdom, these are not genuinely equivalent theories: they differ in statespace structure. I suggest that we should be realists about statespace structure. (shrink)

Through the mental experiment that I suggest, it is possiblc to demonstrate that Hugh Everett’s quantum interpretation, known as of the “many universes”, is incongruent with the special theory of relativity.

In the standard model of cosmology, λCDM, were introduced to explain the anomalies of the orbital velocities of galaxies in clusters highest according estimated by General Relativity the dark matter and the accelerated expansion of the universe the dark energy. The model λCDM is based in the equations of the General Relativity that of the total mass-energy of the universe assigns 4.9% to matter (including only baryonic matter), 26.8%, to dark matter and 68.3% to dark energy adjusted according observed in (...) Planck mission, therefore, excluding bosonic matter (quantum vacuum). However, the composition of dark matter and dark energy are unknown. Due to that it lacks of a correct physical theory of gravity since General Relativity is only their powerful equations, which in their applications, their results are interpreted arbitrarily. Properties as curvature, viscous fluid, dragging frame and gravity action are attributed mistakenly to the spacetime by the materialist substantivalism, the most credible philosophical interpretation that complements the General Relativity, caused by its absence of physical definition of spacetime and static gravitational field as immaterial, but which violates, the conception of gravity as an effect of coordinates of the generalization of the inertial motion to the accelerated motion and, in particular, the description of the metric tensor of gravity as a geometric field. These properties are really of the quantum vacuum, the main existence form of the matter. In this paper we propose that the quantum vacuum is the source of dark matter and dark energy, therefore, the components of the quantum vacuum are of them. Both are opposite effects of the quantum vacuum that when gravitationally interacts with the cosmic structures, the vacuum it curves and when such interaction tends to cease by declination of the formation of these structures, occurring since near five milliard of years ago, vacuum it maintains quasi plane, since it interacts gravitationally very weakly with itself, accelerating expansion of the universe. (shrink)

Natural philosophy encompassed all natural phenomena of the physical world. It sought to discover the physical causes of all natural effects and was little concerned with mathematics. By contrast, the exact mathematical sciences were narrowly confined to various computations that did not involve physical causes, functioning totally independently of natural philosophy. Although this began slowly to change in the late Middle Ages, a much more thoroughgoing union of natural philosophy and mathematics occurred in the seventeenth century and thereby made the (...) Scientific Revolution possible. The title of Isaac Newton's great work, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, perfectly reflects the new relationship. Natural philosophy became the 'Great Mother of the Sciences', which by the nineteenth century had nourished the manifold chemical, physical, and biological sciences to maturity, thus enabling them to leave the 'Great Mother' and emerge as the multiplicity of independent sciences we know today. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics and probability theory share one peculiarity. Both have well established mathematical formalisms, yet both are subject to controversy about the meaning and interpretation of their basic concepts. Since probability plays a fundamental role in QM, the conceptual problems of one theory can affect the other. We first classify the interpretations of probability into three major classes: inferential probability, ensemble probability, and propensity. Class is the basis of inductive logic; deals with the frequencies of events in repeatable experiments; describes (...) a form of causality that is weaker than determinism. An important, but neglected, paper by P. Humphreys demonstrated that propensity must differ mathematically, as well as conceptually, from probability, but he did not develop a theory of propensity. Such a theory is developed in this paper. Propensity theory shares many, but not all, of the axioms of probability theory. As a consequence, propensity supports the Law of Large Numbers from probability theory, but does not support Bayes theorem. Although there are particular problems within QM to which any of the classes of probability may be applied, it is argued that the intrinsic quantum probabilities are most naturally interpreted as quantum propensities. This does not alter the familiar statistical interpretation of QM. But the interpretation of quantum states as representing knowledge is untenable. Examples show that a density matrix fails to represent knowledge. (shrink)