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180 14 Physical Process and Physical Law David Ritz Finkelstein I would like to thank the conveners for this chance to recall some of my debts to Whitehead. I am no disciple, but I was certainly influenced by his thought, more than I realized at the time. I will tell the story in roughly chronological order. Quantum Logic In high school I read science fiction. One of the novels of L. Sprague de Camp had intriguing symbolic logic equations (only in the original pulp versions, the hard-cover editions are bowdlerized). The idea of an arithmetic of ideas intrigued me and sent me to the Principia Mathematica of Whitehead and Russell, probably my first contact with Whitehead’s thought. As a high school student, I couldn’t get into the central stacks of the New York Public Library at first, but the Harlem branch library had two volumes of the Principia, which I plowed happily through. It took me some years to recover from the chronic logicism I thus contracted in Harlem. Nowadays I think that making logic fundamental is a mistake , because it separates it from dynamics. This split exists in classical thought, but quantum theory fuses logic and dynamics into one simple algebraic unity that should not be divided. Even at the time, I felt let down by the Principia and the other books on logic I tried. They were all obviously right, merely common sense. I had expected to find that logic too had undergone some spectacular imaginationstraining upheaval, just as geometry had under Einstein. It seemed that it had not. Physical Process and Physical Law 181 In fact it had, but I did not find out until I stumbled across von Neumann ’s quantum logic (von Neumann, 1955) later in college. Since so much of physics still used the archaic classical logic, I felt at once that I had found my life’s work. Whitehead’s aphorism, “Geometry is cross-classification,” helped me to understand von Neumann’s quantum logic. One can still say that quantum logic is projective geometry interpreted as cross-classification of quantum systems. Whitehead did not make a sharp distinction between mathematics and logic. That would have been against the main aim of Principia: to reduce mathematics to logic. Von Neumann’s point was that there is a physical logic just as there is a physical geometry, and it is not a part of mathematics any more than physical geometry is. I am not sure Whitehead would have accepted this view, since he preserved a flat space-time in his theory of gravity. Quantum Process Whitehead’s Process and Reality also made it easier for me to understand some of modern physics. Whitehead had set out to found a cosmology not on the intuitions of Newton but on the latest state of our information about the world, which means the basic ideas of relativity and quantum theory. I find these ideas all through his work. One problem is that while relativity swept the field within a few years after its enunciation, quantum theory was split up into dialects. Different people describe the same experiences in remarkably different languages. This is confusing even to physicists. How can you tell when physicists agree if they sound so different? It is certainly confusing to the general public. I think this Tower of Babel leads many people still to think of quantum theory as a problem to be solved rather than the solution of a problem. The pioneering wave theory of Count Louis de Broglie, who never accepted Heisenberg’s radical quantum view, still has great influence. Wigner promulgated a non-Copenhagen way to express quantum theory that he termed “orthodox.” Orthodox quantum theory drops the quantum wholeness and objectlessness that Bohr and Heisenberg emphasized, and treats the wave function as the fundamental variable object of quantum theory. It speaks just as if the system under study were a wave, but one that “collapses” when we make measurements on the system. There are systems whose states are wave functions. They are called waves. A quantum is not a wave. Wave functions represent acts of preparing the quantum and measuring its properties. There are two such processes in every experiment, input at the beginning and outtake at the end. We do one, then we do the other. Many teachers of quantum theory mistake one process following another for one object collapsing into another. [3.146.255.127] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 18...

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