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THOMISM AND THE QUANTUM ENIGMA WILLIAM A. WALLACE, 0.P. University ofMaryland College Park, Maryland THE RECENT PUBLICATION of Wolfgang Smith's The Quantum Enigma: Finding the Hidden Key 1 has done more than propose a novel interpretation of quantum theory. It has also reopened a train of thought that has been somewhat muted in recent decades, namely, that of the relevance of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas to solving problems raised by modern physics. What I have in mind are books published in the 1950s and 1960s by Jesuit professors at the Gregorian University in Rome 2 and by Vincent Edward Smith in the United States,3 plus my own writings on the subject before I became heavily involved in the history of science.4 Now, out of the blue, as it were, Aquinas's name is once again being invoked in the context of modern science, this time as originating concepts that provide a "hidden key" to the solution of the quantum 1 Peru, Ill.: Sherwood Sugden & Company, Publishers, 1995, iii + 140 pp., with an appendix, a glossary, and an index of names. 2 Especially the following, all published by the Gregorian University Press, Rome: Peter Hoenen, S.J., Cosmologia, 5th ed. (1956); idem, De noetica geometriae (1954); Philip Soccorsi, S.J., De physica quantica (1956); idem, De vi cognitionis humanae in scientia physica (1958); idem, De geometriis et spatiis non-Euclideis (1960). 3 Notably his Philosophical Physics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950); and Footnotes for the Atom (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co., 1951). 4 See my"Newtonian Antinomies Against the Prima Via," The Thomist 19 (1956): 15192 ; "The Reality of Elementary Particles," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 38 (1964): 154-66; "St. Thomas and the Pull of Gravity," in Science and the Liberal Concept (West Hartford, Conn.: St. Joseph College, 1964), 14365 ; and "Elementarity and Reality in Particle Physics," Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 3 (1968): 236-71. 455 456 WILLIAM A. WALLACE enigma. The author of this startling claim, a professor of mathematics at Oregon State University and apparently no relation to Vincent Edward Smith, surely deserves a hearing in these pages. Wolfgang Smith's thesis is set out in six chapters: the first two, "Rediscovering the Corporeal World" and "What is the Physical Universe?," establish the terms of discourse; the next two, "Microworld and Indeterminacy" and "Materia Signata Quantitate," propose Smith's solution, which basically consists in explaining the significance of state vector collapse in quantum theory; and the last two, "On Whether 'God Plays Dice?"' and "In the Beginning," draw out metaphysical implications of this teaching. An appendix provides a brief mathematical introduction to quantum theory so that the reader can appreciate what is meant by state vector collapse and other technical terms. A glossary gives a handy index of such terms and where they occur in the text. In Smith's view, the devil that needs to be exorcised from contemporary physics is the bifurcationism that took its origin from Rene Descartes, then was reinforced by a succession of philosophers from John Locke to Immanuel Kant (chap. 1). This is the split between res extensa and res cogitans, the first denuding the world of sensible qualities and the second creating the impression that all such qualities (and the nature that underlies them, das Ding an sick) are projected into the universe by the observer. The mind-set such bifurcationism puts into physicists is so strong, and has been reinforced in so many ways by their education and culture, that it is almost impossible for them to recognize it, let alone work at eradicating it. But eradicate it they must if they would solve the enigmas of quantum theory. And the only way they can do so, Smith argues, is by rediscovering the corporeal world. What this means is that they must learn what it is to perceive the world as it presents itself in sense experience, to experience in their own lives the "miracle" of sense perception (16).5 The apple is outside us, but we perceive it nonetheless, with its colors and its other attributes, which are as real as we sense them to be (1-20). 5...

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