Brief attempt about quantum and wholeness – There is no matter

You are in „Things and Concepts“

With the quantum, science had introduced a new concept at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. This had become necessary because experimental measurements in the order of magnitude below molecules yielded results that could not be explained by classical physics. In addition, the phenomena occurring in these experiments cannot be unambiguously characterized as waves or particles and they are also quantized, meaning they occur not continuously but in discrete stages of change – a concept known as quantum. This was the foundation of quantum physics, which deals with the behavior and interactions of the smallest particles and processes in order to make them calculable. Even though the world that quantum theory describes runs counter to common sense in many ways, our modern world would be unimaginable without it. We would have neither nuclear energy, lasers, nuclear spin tomographs, nor microchips.

In 1900, Max Planck was the first to hypothesize, in order to explain the radiation spectrum of an ideal black body, that electromagnetic radiation can only absorb and dissipate energy in portions. In 1905, Albert Einstein went a step further when, in explaining the photoelectric effect, he claimed that light is even made up of packets of light called photons. – A small sacrilege, because according to James Clerk Maxwell’s then prevailing theory, light was imagined as a wave propagating in an ether-like field.

The abrupt behavior of quantization is the core of quantum theory. For example, an electron moving around an atomic nucleus cannot have arbitrary energy levels and therefore must jump to move from one energy state to another. Therefore, an electromagnetic field cannot change its energy by arbitrary values. Instead, it can only be absorbed and released in small portions, namely photons.

In the first third of the 20th century, researchers such as Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger laid the mathematical foundations of quantum theory. Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics, introduced in 1925, and Bohr’s wave mechanics, introduced in 1926, claimed to accurately determine the states of quantum objects, such as the electrons in an atom. In 1927, both models fulfilled the common goal of modeling the radiation spectrum of the hydrogen atom, thanks to identical predictions.
However, their results swept away the foundations of the mechanistic worldview. They abolished the long-existing dualism between particle and wave nature of matter but had to give up the ideas of a determined and therefore calculable world and the real existing matter!

On the level of atomic components, matter does not exist at definitely determinable places, and also atomic processes do not run at definitely determinable times and in exactly defined ways. Instead, we get only probability values as answers to both questions. For instance, we could find an electron 80% at the North Pole and 20% at the South Pole, while the probability of a quantum leap to a lower orbit could range from 50% to 50%.

The mathematical quantities of these probability values resemble waves, implying that particles can function as waves simultaneously. However, we must not think of them as real three-dimensional water waves or sound waves. These probability waves are merely abstract mathematical quantities that possess wave-like properties and provide us with the probability of finding a particle at a specific time and location. Only when we step from the calculation to the metrological determination does the probability wave, which contains all conceivable states, break down, and we learn something about the actual state of the quantum object. Thus, without our direct „looking“, a quantum object does not really manifest itself. It has no meaning as an entity of any kind. Instead, we can only comprehend it by observing its interaction with us. – Descartes‘ separation of the I and the rest of the world is thus no longer tenable. Thus physics has dissolved the concept of the „solid body“ as we know it and shows us at this point for the first time that all things are one.

«The break that the new physics demands is profound. It is not only a paradigm shift, as described by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book „The Structure of Scientific Revolutions“ . This new physics suggests that reality, as we understand it, is fundamentally not a thing-like reality. Reality reveals itself primarily only as potentiality, as a „both/and“, thus only as possibility for a realization in the material reality familiar to us, which expresses itself in object-like and the logic of the „either/or“ subjected manifestations. Potentiality emerges as an entity that defies separation and dissection. Against the backdrop of our accustomed conception, which has been decisively shaped by the classical worldview, this sounds monstrous and actually unacceptable.
Hans-Peter Dürr, Geist, Kosmos und Physik (1)

Next The birth of quantum mechanics

If you found this post useful and want to support the continuation of my writing without intrusive advertising, please consider supporting. Your assistance goes towards helping make the content on this website even better. If you’d like to make a one-time ‘tip’ and buy me a coffee, I have a Ko-Fi page. Your support means a lot. Thank you!