"The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits." G.K. Chesterton

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

All aboard!

This is an oldie that I dug up from the desperate literary attempts of mine. The style is a bit awkward at times, but nevertheless remains a fun read...I hope:)

"The morning bus ride", whether destined for work, school or college seems to be a rather unique phenomenon, in a category of its own among commuting experiences. The actual means of public transport is irrelevant and in order for the trip to qualify to that special category, it needs to fulfill two conditions; it must take place early in the morning, and on a regular basis.

Having lived in various places around the world and having frequently participated in the morning ride "ritual", I can say with the confidence of a globetrotter that its unique character is perpetually common to suburbia worldwide. Taking those morning trips anywhere; whether it be Melbourne, Warsaw or Surrey in British Columbia, one cannot possibly fail to notice the obvious similarities.

For instance there is always at least a quarter of passengers on board to whom getting out of bed, having a shower and possibly managing a quick breakfast doesn't actually mean waking up. This becomes obvious as they nod off during the trip. They don't even need to be sitting in order to do that mind you. To the amusement of some, their heads bounce up into a quasiconscious state with every more abrupt movement of the bus. That occurrence is not reserved solely to the morning bus ride however. It does also take place in movie theaters and opera houses alike.

One of the hallmarks of early morning commuting are people who obviously hadn't had time to have a coffee before getting on, and probably won't have the time once they get off, yet crave the feeling of alertness. The shapes and sizes of those portable coffee mugs people carry are endless – its almost as if the bus plays a secondary role of a venue for some mobile home-ware design fair, where the representatives of participating manufacturers had been recruited from Catatonics Anonymous. Last but not least there are the students and eager employees with sleepy dazes fixed on the pages of their text books and laptop screens. If their belief is that our brains actually are at their receptive peak in the morning, which of course may be true, then certainly their faces don't reflect it.

Basically the atmosphere aboard the morning bus, with its vivid presence of sleepiness and a kind of passive absence, magnified by the routine factor, creates an air of suspended animation. Yes, the monotony of the trip adds to the detachment of the self from the slow motion nature of the surroundings.

Taking part in the early ride, being to most just an extension of the morning routine, possibly its final stage, one generally moves about in an automatic and absent minded manner; as a sufficient example of this may serve the mouthful of a mantra recited mechanically to the bus driver which encodes within it the full description of the ticket we desire. Attending to some business in West Vancouver on a daily basis, and therefore taking the bus to Surrey Central in order to board a westbound sky train that's exactly how I treat it - as the opening sequence to my day.

Now that I think of it, the routine-induced detachment is so profound in fact that I can't seem to recall a single bus driver's face. Even though I've seen them countless times, in the end they all just seem to blend into this one, vague and featureless, uniformed figure in my mind handing me a ticket over the coin dispenser. All the drivers faded from my memory, but one. Yes, that particular one who is the sole reason why I'm writing about the "commonly known and exhilarating experience of the morning bus ride, bursting with a myriad of inspiring subjects and events just begging to be made a mention of".

"All aboard!” announced in a summoning manner by the smiling bus driver, is generally the first hint for those entering the bus that this is not going to be just another ordinary ride. There's also the effect caused by the driver's personal remarks; referring to random boarding passengers as a "young lady", or "young man", which proves to have nearly spell like qualities. It almost always makes the kids beam with smug satisfaction, as they take their places. After all they had just been promoted to a more mature status by the "Captain". Passengers beyond their upper thirties, on the other hand can't help but smile upon receiving such a spontaneous compliment.

What struck me as delightfully unusual when encountering that cheerful character for the first time wasn't actually his giddy invitation, but something that took place during the purchase of my ticket. It happened once I got on the bus, probably because it was only then that I actually entered his domain of magical influence. In order to get to West Vancouver, I asked for a three zone fare. It was then that I discovered just how far such a ticket in fact entitles me to travel. "All the way around the world!” the driver enthusiastically confirmed my request, handing me the suddenly precious three zone pass.

Observing the driver and the way his behavior influenced all the passengers, I realized that surely this can't be your typical "morning bus ride". All of a sudden the cliché seemed to fade away, disrupted by a new kind of activity permeating throughout the entire bus. The ride ceased to be a part of the compulsory morning routine. Seeing the children peer through the windows with a somewhat more eager than usual curiosity while the adults immerse themselves in lively conversations brought to mind images comparable to those seen on school excursions or sight seeing tours.

Overwhelmed by the surrounding atmosphere, I soon realized that it's not a bus I'm on anymore, but a cruise ship. Surrey Central suddenly ceased to be a Sky train station, becoming instead some far away port on one of the distant Pacific Ocean islands, serving as a stopover on a journey to some yet further exotic destination. The asphalt visible directly outside transformed into a calm surface of the friendly sea.

In all my travels I have never encountered such a display of creative spontaneity on the part of a public transport employee. Well, maybe except a certain tram driver in Melbourne who sang for two days during work hours, the reason being, which he gladly shared with the bewildered passengers, his approaching marriage date.

What's extraordinary about this particular driver of line 320 is that his behavior doesn't seem to be influenced by the weather, time of the year or any other external conditions for that matter. He just seems to be enjoying his job and the way his original aura brightens everyone's day. For that I'm grateful to him. So if he ever wondered if his commitment was worthwhile, I'm sure most of us traveling in his presence would have a ready answer: "Aye, aye Captain!”

Surrey B.C. January 2006.

Monday, March 31, 2008

But, it’s the same ship!

In the following essay I will give reasons supporting the view that an object exposed to gradual change over time does not loose its identity. To further strengthen that view I will illustrate in the context of the ancient puzzle of Theseus’s ship, by means of discounting claims contrary to mine, how continuous persistence in space and over time is a necessary condition for maintaining identity. In the context of the presented puzzle (see the Annex enclosed at the end, to familiarize yourself with it) the above will be carried out by defending the soundness of the argument claiming that ship A, at the end of the day remains the one and only ship of Theseus, namely The Spirit of Athens.

Object such as trees or rivers are contained in the conceptual repertoire of our reality. Furthermore each of such objects is agreed to possess an identity, which means that although imbedded in the continuous flux of apparent existence it remains the one and the same object over time (numerical identity). A tree may shed its leaves in autumn, so obviously some part of its material constituency is carried away by the wind, that is to say some physical part of the tree at an earlier moment in time is not a part of the tree anymore at some later time (qualitative identity requires exact resemblance, so in this case it is violated). Conversely, a tree grows new branches, a phenomenon which introduces new parts which have not been part of the plant at some earlier stage. One should also note that it is the tree that is undergoing change, and although it is not similar to its earlier self, it does not cease to be the self – the object undergoing change. The point is that the above described changes do not alter the numerical identity of the part of reality we agreed to label a tree. By definition, trees are objects which among many other things grow and shed leafage seasonally.
The phenomenon of a river, serves as another example of that which retains its identity in spite of not possessing identical parts from one moment to the next. It is the same river at any moment, due to its nature. This is what we define as a river – a flowing and meandering trail of water guided by gravity, prone to evaporation, erosion of the banks and occasional flooding which changes its shape significantly. To be sure it varies along its length even at a single moment in time. Arguably if it didn’t flow, and possessed neither a spring at a higher altitude nor a mouth spilling into the sea it would be labeled a lake, albeit an oddly elongated one.

The case of the ship of Theseus can be placed in the same category of phenomena as the above examples. Ships are prone to damage, and consequently to the replacement of parts. Such repairs do not alter the numerical identity of the ship. Although its qualitative identity has changed (teak planks instead of oak planks) from some earlier moment in time, nevertheless it remains the same ship. The Key Premise (KP) here is the gradual replacement of one plank at a time not altering the numerical identity of the ship. Since replacing one plank does not alter the numerical identity of the ship, I conclude that the ship in Dock A, that is ship A, at the end of the entire replacement process (at t-1000 minutes) is still Theseus’s ship, namely The Spirit of Athens. The argument follows the valid form of Modus Ponens.

(1) At minute 0t the ship in Dock A is clearly The Spirit of Athens.
(2) The gradual replacement of one plank at a time does not alter the identity (numerical) of the ship.
(3) Changes applied to the ship in Dock A, between 0t minutes and 1000t minutes were such that only one plank at a time has been replaced.
(Hence) The ship in Dock A at minute 1000t is the same ship as that in Dock A at minute 0t, namely The Spirit of Athens.

Suppose one was to question the truth of (KP) and deny persistence of ship’s numerical identity if any of the intrinsic parts, which constituted The Spirit of Athens at time t-0 minutes, were to be removed or shifted (that is, if its qualitative identity were in any way altered). Furthermore, one could claim contrary to (KP) that “a complex whole object such a ship is nothing more than the sum of its parts in a determinate arrangement” which would consequently imply that in fact it is ship B in Dock B at time t-1000 which is the actual and only ship of Theseus since it consists of no more or less than precisely the 1000 oak planks which made up the Spirit of Athens at time t-0. Suppose further, that one would argue by interpreting that what has actually taken place in Dock A was not the repair of the original ship, but in fact the building of a teak replica of it, which had to be disassembled temporarily in order to facilitate the replication process. To be sure, the original boat was to be only momentarily disassembled, only to be reassembled again (in Dock B) upon the replica’s completion (in Dock A).

It seems perfectly natural to inquire where would the actual ship in question, namely The Spirit of Athens, be between the beginning and the end of the repair, or if some may wish replication process. That would be also the first step in the inquiry how did The Spirit of Athens get from dock A to dock B? (I suppose the answer would be more substantial then the soul of the ship literally leaping between docks, which would amount to an unjustified metaphysical claim.) Clearly at t-0 it’s in Dock A, and according to the above reasoning it would be in Dock B at t-1000. As far as the above definition is concerned, once a single original oak plank has been taken away the identity would in fact perish. This would be equivalent to saying that there is no ship with the identity of the original ship, which amounts to saying that the original ship ceases to exist. This would imply that if Theseus during one of his voyages were to lose a plank from The Spirit of Athens he would literally at one moment be sailing The Spirit of Athens, and in the next he would not be sailing The Spirit of Athens, but supposedly some other ship, or what’s worse no ship at all!

I see two possibilities of defending the denial of (KP) against the above absurdity. The first would be where one may argue that the ship does not cease to exist, but enters a potential state of being. This means that the object in question potentially exists, awaiting its reassembly in the same manner as a watch does on a watchmakers table after being disassembled for repair. Surely one wouldn’t question that it is the same watch once it has been fixed! The first line of defense of the objection to (KP) would then rely on justifying the possibility of intermittent existence.
The concept of intermittent existence is unfortunately a problematic one and weakens the position of the objection to (KP). Firstly, when something does not exist (arguably ceases to exist only temporarily) one cannot refer to it because one would be referring to nothing. If one was to ask where is The Spirit of Athens at say time t-20 one could only say that (1) it is not known, since both its existential status and thus position have only potential values and thus both are undetermined (2) The Spirit of Athens does not exist, consisting of a negative existential claim would have to be meaningless if true. For if it indeed does not exist, then what are we referring to?
Now, a defense resorting to intermittent existence would thus permit a scenario where Theseus is once again sailing the Aegean, and the ship upon loosing one plank causes its own location to become undetermined. Where, would then Theseus be? Well I hope that no one would hold that he shares the ship’s undetermined location, and what’s worse its existential status! If not, then where would he be? He’s clearly not walking on water. In fact he would be still aboard a ship the location of which is determined after all, namely under Theseus’s own feet. I cannot accept such support of the objection to (KP) which implies the possibility of an object possessing a determined and undetermined location at the same time.

The second line of defense of the denial of the truth of (KP) would be as follows. Alternatively one may claim that Theseus’s ship identity vanishes once and for all upon replacing the first plank, and thus avoid the difficulties of explaining the original ship’s whereabouts at any given moment. Would one hold such a view if the ship was made up of a million planks? How about a trillion? I understand that the thrust of the denial of (KP) is not concerned with the number of constituent parts, but merely their sum in a determinate arrangement.
To consistently embrace such a view would require the denial of anything maintaining its numerical identity with the slightest alternation of its qualitative identity. Since as far as empirical evidence shows everything is in a state of continuous flux, at least on the fundamental level, the two categories could not mutually persist over time, except within some infinitesimal intervals where change does not take place. But the shortest intervals that we can speak of in any meaningful way refer to the oscillation cycles of radiation in atoms which by definition are undergoing a constant exchange of energy quanta (exchange of “parts”). So it would follow that numerical identity could not, in any meaningful way be applied to any physical object. In other words identity would be rendered meaningless when applied to the reality which unfolds itself before us. Consequently the tree in my backyard would not be the same tree it was in the previous minute, and the ephemeral phenomenon labeled at one particular moment in time as The Brisbane River would be some other river at the very next moment or maybe not even a river at all! As far as I acknowledge this line of reasoning, I’m not prepared to accept it and consistently follow it through because I fear it would lead me to hypocrisy.

As the argument for ship A is valid, the only way to undermine its soundness would be to show the falsehood of one of the premises. I have provided serious objections to the premise on which the entire argument depends. Since my refutations have shown these objections to contain serious problems I declare the argument as successfully defended within the scope of this paper.

ANNEX
The Problem of Theseus's Ship
Suppose that the seafaring Theseus arrives in a shipyard near Athens with his ship The Spirit of Athens that is made of nothing but 1000 oak planks. It requires repair so he sails it into Dock A. At this time, minute 0t, the ship in Dock A is clearly The Spirit of Athens — Theseus's ship. The shipwright begins repairs by replacing one of its oak planks with a matching teak plank, putting the teak plank in exactly the same position as the original oak one and putting the oak plank to one side. This is completed at minute 1t. At minute 2t the ship in Dock A again has another oak plank removed and replaced by a teak one of the same size and shape in the same position, the oak plank being put to one side. Proceeding in this way the shipwright eventually replaces all the oak planks on the ship in Dock A with matching teak planks put together in the same way as the original — thus constructing Ship A. The ship in Dock A at minute 1000t — Ship A — is made completely of teak planks, the original 1000 oak planks having all been put to one side.
Meanwhile another shipwright decides to build a ship in Dock B. Finding an oak plank now lying around he begins to assemble Ship B. At minute 1t the ship in Dock B consists of nothing but the one oak plank in the same position as it was in the original ship before being removed. At minute 2t another discarded plank is found and put into the very same position it occupied in the original ship. After 1000t minutes Dock B contains a ship — Ship B — which is made out of all and only the oak planks from Theseus's original ship put together in exactly the same way as they were in Dock A at minute 0t.
Now, regardless of which ship Theseus now claims as his own and sails away in, there appear to be good arguments for each ship, Ship A and Ship B, being counted as Theseus's ship The Spirit of Athens.

ARGUMENT IN SUPPORT OF SHIP A: Consider Ship A. At minute 0t the ship in Dock A is clearly The Spirit of Athens. Changing one plank of a 1000-plank ship does not alter the identity of the ship (the difference is too small to make a difference) so, since the ship in Dock A at minute 1t only differs by one plank, at minute 1t the ship in Dock A is The Spirit of Athens. Yet, the ship in Dock A at minute 2t only differs from that in Dock A at 1t by one plank — a difference which we just claimed did not alter the identity of the ship — so the ship in Dock A at minute 2t is the same ship as that in Dock A at minute 1t, namely The Spirit of Athens. In general, since changes to the original Spirit of Athens are only made one plank at a time, and such changes are too small to make a difference to the ship's identity, the ship in Dock A at minute 1000t — Ship A — is still Theseus's ship, The Spirit of Athens.

ARGUMENT IN SUPPORT OF SHIP B: Consider Ship B, on the other hand. There would appear to be an equally compelling reason for thinking it is The Spirit of Athens. Surely a complex whole object such as a ship is nothing but the sum of its parts in a determinate arrangement. Now, the ship in Dock B at minute 1000t is composed of exactly the same planks as the ship in Dock A at minute 0t (The Spirit of Athens) in exactly the same determinate arrangement. So this ship, namely that in Dock B at minute 1000t — Ship B — is Theseus's ship The Spirit of Athens.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Walker, James S. Physics. New Jersey: Pearson Education 2004.

Noonan, Harold. Identity. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. First published: Dec 15 2004. http://library.usyd.edu.au/stanford/entries/identity/ accessed 8th April 2007.

Reality – paradise unattainable.

This essay will consist of two parts each focusing respectively on the initial and conclusive sections of Bohr’s statement (below). The arguments emerging from the following commentary to Bohr’s view of physics aim to emphasize the importance of the adaptation of a balance between the realist and agnostic attitudes in scientific inquiry, as well as point out the conceptual crisis caused by the breadth of human experience which results in the impossibility of clear and comprehensible appreciation of that experience.

“Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods for ordering and surveying human experience.” - Niels Bohr

Before any polemic or commentary to the above statement is made, at least a superficial analysis (due to the limited length of this paper) of its implications needs to be carried out in order to provide a platform of unambiguous reference.

One can safely assume that here Bohr sees physics to as the most fundamental of the natural sciences, and therefore potentially unlimited in its scope (i.e. encompassing all other sciences) since he uses its role as an exemplification of the role of scientific inquiry in general. This can be inferred from the empirical declaration emphasizing the primary role of experience viz. a posteriori knowledge.

A more careful survey of the above will lead one to realize that the something that Bohr tentatively denies as “a priori given” object of inquiry is reality itself. In his view physics should limit itself to statements concerning our knowledge of nature and refrain from metaphysical speculation. This attitude is clearly echoed in the words of another “Copenhagist”, Werner Heisenberg who writes in his Physics and Philosophy: “What we learn about is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our methods of questioning”. Such a view renders physics metaphysically mute.

This limitation imposed on physics, legitimizing only statements about phenomena does remind one of Berkeley’s subjective idealism, where talk of a reality beyond perceptions is unjustified since it is only their content that one has access to. In fact that very content alone qualifies to have any ontological status at all[1]. Direct parallels could be drawn between the role of perception in Berkeley’s system and measurement in Bohr’s physics and their exclusive status as the basis of our knowledge. There is a fundamental difference however. Our view of reality as “looked” upon through the eye of physics by Bohr’s definition is indeed necessarily tainted by our experience, but this is not to say that there is nothing causing the particular result of measurement. In other words the Danish natural philosopher indeed is not a dogmatic realist[2], but such a position does not imply anti realism of the Berkleyan type. He remains an agnostic.

Having briefly analyzed the Copenhagen position with respect to what should not be seen as the role of physics, the positive aspect of its activity as posited by Bohr will now be discussed. This will be done with the aid of a close analogical relationship mentioned earlier, between human experience and science (physics in particular). The latter can be seen as an extension of human senses which allowes an incessant broadening of human experience of the world in general. This increase in scope necessarily forces the constant development of language in order to accommodate this new experience.

New experiences not only broaden our knowledge base but also serve as platforms for further discoveries. This process has probably evolved hand in hand with the development of language in the human species. The capacity and ability of the human mind has been constantly revised in a positive feedback process between nature and the intelligent observer, magnified more so with the ability to communicate and record the acquired observations. That process has been subsequently formalized by the likes of Aristotle, Galileo and Francis Bacon just to name a few key figures in the human development of thought and refinement of methods of inquiry. This development consequently broadens the set of concepts which can be seen as the carriers of meaning in this dynamic interplay.

Subsequent millennia and finally centuries of scientific endeavor have exposed the limitations of our innate senses and hence immediate perception of the world. As good examples may serve the shape of our planet (which is locally flat), the mechanics of the heliocentric system or the breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum to which we only have a significantly limited access. However surprising this class of discoveries has been, the fundament had already been laid down by philosophical activity making these counter intuitive discoveries that much easier to absorb by the collective.

With the advent of early 20th century paradigm shifting theory of special relativity our cherished and fundamental intuitions harbored by the concepts of absolute space and time were seriously revised. Modern physics had ventured completely out of reach of the everyday tangible experience (i.e. we do not in any noticeable way experience the relativistic effects of time dilation and length contraction). In this new framework of broader experience the concept of simultaneity of space-like separated events turns out to be a meaningless conceptual fossil which should be abandoned. This means that our common sense notions about the world and causation, and even Newton’s laws do not hold true in general but turn out to be merely a limiting case of how the world is. Still prior to the quantum revolution, the need for a refinement of our language in describing our experience required the adaptation of a model containing the concept of space-time curvature in order to accommodate the verified predictions of general relativity. This new framework had boldly abandoned our intuitions.

Enough historical evidence shows that Bohr’s idea of the active role of physics has in fact been taking place all along. Seeing in retrospective how science indeed consisted of developing increasingly more sophisticated methods allowing a systematic and rigorous ordering of human inquiry (experience). However before moving on to the second part of Bohr’s statement, the importance of motive behind scientific inquiry in general should be emphasized.

Wouldn’t curiosity, arguably unique to the human species, serve as a candidate motive? Has it been the desire to categorize phenomena into a systematic and consistent system in order to predict still more phenomena and patterns emerging from them? Or maybe the motive is deeper than that? A closer analysis will in fact reveal that it has been the desire to explain and discover the causes of the appearances, emerging from the belief that there is some underlying and absolute reality behind the veil of phenomena. Einstein himself expresses the above as follows:”The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science”. It has been the belief of high priests, philosophers and scientists that there exists some absolute, Arché, ideal forms, primary qualities, noumena from which all appearances emerge.

In fact it is necessary to adopt the metaphysical realist attitude at least to some degree in order to do any science at all. Only after this has been agreed upon, further philosophical discussion may commence concerning to what degree this attitude should be implemented before it becomes a hindrance. Even Bohr with his view of the role of physics is not entirely immune to the necessity of the presence of realism in science. One needs to make some fundamental assumptions about reality in order to make any sense of the results of experiments. For example, when recording the number of clicks of the Geiger counter caused by the current induced by electrons ejected from ionized gas molecules as a result of bombardment by alpha particles emitted by a radioactive isotope, the experimenter not only makes a series of assumptions about causality, but also the consistent behavior of phenomena previously observed. The assumption of causality is obviously a realist approach and the expectation of consistent results also assumes a permanent status quo feebly supported by induction.

As a fitting example of the importance of realist approach in discovery one needs to look no further than the EPR argument posed by Einstein and his colleagues, and the surprising result of Bell’s proof. It was the deeply cherished belief in an ultimately objective reality that drove the father of special relativity to devise a thought experiment aimed to expose the noumena behind the enormously successful quantum theory[3].

The core of the argument was the belief of objectively existing “hidden variables” intrinsic to quantum entities prior to observation. According to Einstein and contrary to Bohr these hidden variables were merely waiting to be revealed by measurement. In particular, the correlated pair of photon polarization[4] attributes (spin) existed in a mixed rather than pure state. Since the two measurements (events) of these photons were to be space-like separated one could assume that the first measurement could not influence the second one unless it traveled faster than the speed of light. This fundamental assumption, so very realistic in character was to lead to one of most profound consequences of quantum theory.

It took almost thirty years before John S. Bell, fascinated by the EPR argument, approached it with the hope of proving Einstein’s intuitions with mathematical rigor. The proof consisted of formalizing the requirements of locality, setting out the expectations of two models (the Einstein mixed state hidden variable view, and the Copenhagen pure, entangled state) and finally calculating their consecutive predictions concerning the probabilities of correlated outcomes of the space-like separated measurements of the spin attribute. The conclusion of the proof turned out to be, contrary to Bell’s expectations, in favor of the quantum theory prediction. Furthermore, this purely mathematical result has been confirmed experimentally numerous times since Bell published his paper. What this amounts to is a rather paradigm shattering consequence, that no local model of reality can explain the result of the EPR experiment.

The above discovery serves as an ironic example how the realist approach has served as an arguably necessary means of revealing the contrary nature of its own set of principal assumptions and thus vindicating Bohr’s epistemic caution not to take anything as “a priori given”. One can safely conclude that a balanced interplay and implementation of both worldviews is necessary to fruitful inquiry.

“In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgment and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in common human language.”
- Niels Bohr

Let’s venture a little further into the consequences brought by human expanded experience, and inspect the impact it had on language. After our intuitive notions of space and time were shattered by relativity, quantum theory has brought its own set of reformations some of which necessitated an outright abandonment of some fundamental concepts about the world. The Planck scale has turned out to be a world so different from what classical physics explains that it may well be considered to be governed by its own set of laws. Despite its enormous predictive success, for a long time no one had an idea how to interpret the physical significance of the theory. The Schrödinger equation had an oracle like status until Bohm suggested treating the modulus of the square of the wave function as the representation of the probability of finding the quantum system in some particular state upon measurement[5]. These early difficulties in attributing meaning to the quantum model signified a dawn of a conceptual crisis.

The abandonment of any determinate properties existing at all prior to measurement was forced upon us as a necessary consequence of the desire of making any sense of the predicted phenomena. This alien property of the Planck scale referred to as the complementarity principle has emerged from countless and consistent results of experiments performed on quantum systems. A quantum entity behaves both as a wave and a particle at the same time. This duality is based on concepts which are self exclusive in classical physics - something is either a wave or a particle, but not both. On the other hand concepts such as position and momentum which are inseparable in the classical (non quantum) scale turn out to be impossible to coexist simultaneously at the Plank level. An electron for instance simply does not possess the property of a definite position and equally definite momentum at the same time. These incompatibilities of various attributes at the Plank scale have been rigorously formalized by Heisenberg in what became one of the most celebrated and experimentally confirmed properties of the quantum world – the uncertainty principle.

The conceptual crisis deepened as the rate of new experience surpassed the scope of most preexisting concepts. Only mathematics had kept pace with the exponential expansion of unique experiences in this human scientific endeavor. Generating concepts clearly defined and potentially infinite in scope due to its symbolic nature, mathematics works as the litmus paper of consistency in observation. It has been among other things the ultimate conceptual generator. Its formal structure and rigor make it the indispensable tool for systematic and consistent accommodation of new phenomena to newly provided sets of abstractions. Due to its limitless capacity it contains a record of the entire human experience and makes possible unambiguous communication, albeit abstract, to facilitate further inquiry.

Nevertheless human curiosity demands concepts which satisfy intuition, and no abstraction no matter how precisely defined, will suffice if it does not produce some comprehensible mental picture. This naturally has become increasingly difficult with the discovery of the exotic nature of realms not accessible to direct observation and governed by laws which defy common sense.

In spite of these difficulties scientist still try to aid imagination with concepts “closer to home”. In an attempt to bring closer to reason the fuzzy world of superimposed states, which defy the law of excluded middle in logic, Heisenberg borrows the Aristotelian concept of potentia in order to give a more intuitive picture of nature before measurement. So it is rather possibilities or tendencies that remain objective in the quantum view of reality.

My belief, of a puzzled student of physics and philosophy is that even if mathematics will persevere in maintaining a well defined and conceptually rigorous picture of reality, it will necessarily not be for the appreciation of any human individual, and this picture will ultimately fade away into incomprehensible heights of abstraction. As a consequence of this Bohr’s wish for physics to offer a language which could be “unambiguously communicated in common human language” seems as an impossible task.


Bibliography
Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (Penguin Classics, 2000)
Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality – Beyond the New Physics (Anchor Books,1987)
Peter Kosso, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Physics (1998)
David Miller, Phil2011 Philosophy of Modern Physics lecture notes (Sem. II, 2007).
[1]The argument is problematic since Berkeley goes from stating that since perceptions or, using Kant’s terminology which will be adopted in this essay, phenomena is all we can have access to, nuomena necessarily do not exist. That is to say Berkeley makes an unjustified leap from an agnostic framework by his own definition to that of an anti realist. He clearly wishes to have the cake and eat it too
[2] For the purpose of this essay a definition of dogmatic realism will be adopted from Heisenberg’s Philosophy and Physics. He defines it as a form of objectivating reality. According to him we objectivate reality or in particular a statement about reality when we claim that its content does not depend on the conditions under which it can be verified. Dogmatic realism claims that there are no statements about reality which cannot be objectivated. Philosophy and Physics, Werner Heisenberg (2000) p.43
[3] The Copenhagen interpretation which laid the fundament for quantum theory and which was the target of the EPR argument professed to be exclusively a theory of phenomena.
[4] The original EPR experiment concerned two momentum correlated electrons, but for reasons of clarity the conceptually simpler version of the experiment proposed by David Bohm involving polarization correlated photons (Nick Herbert, 1987, p.201) will be adopted in this paper.
[5] David Miller, Phil2011 Philosophy of Modern Physics lecture notes (Sem. II, 2007), Part2 Physics, p.3.