Properties Of Quantum Objects Research Articles

ON THE ROLE OF V. HEISENBERG, E. SCHRÖDINGER, K.F. WEIZSACKER, N. BOHR AND M. HEIDEGGER IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE LOGICAL AND MATHEMATICAL FOUNDATIONS OF QUANTUM PHYSICS

The development of the logical and mathematical foundations of quantum physics and, first of all, quantum mechanics is the work of a large team of physicists, mathematicians and philosophers who have contributed to the solution of this problem. The title of the article lists the names of four scientists who, according to the author, paved the way for the creation of quantum logic. This must be understood in such a way that from the very beginning (Heisenberg and Schrödinger) it was established that the properties of quantum objects are described not by numbers, but by operators. In the relationships of the operators themselves, one could see an analogue of Boolean algebra of classical logic. Weizsäcker raised the question of how the physical quantity of time, in describing the motion states of quantum objects, can be represented: an operator or a state vector? The author of the article shows that the development of quantum mechanics has gone through two stages. The first stage differs in that complex numbers and functions were introduced into physics, in other words, elements of the theory of functions of a complex variable. At the second stage, spinor calculus penetrated into quantum physics. If at the first stage methods were presented for describing the external degrees of freedom (motion) of elementary particles and other quantum objects, then the second stage was marked by the description of internal degrees of elementary particles. It became possible to understand that the measured mass of an electron or any other fermion is an averaged quantity, it consists of two ingredients: a positive mass and a negative mass (two values of the corresponding operator). An important role in this discovery played the operation of dialectical negation (privation), borrowed from Heidegger's fundamental ontology.

Truth Values of Quantum Phenomena

In the paper, the idea of describing not-yet-verified properties of quantum objects with logical many-valuedness is scrutinized. As it is argued, to promote such an idea, the following two foundational problems of many-valued quantum logic must be decided: the problem of choosing a proper system of many-valued logic and the problem of the emergence of bivalence from logical many-valuedness. Difficulties accompanying solutions of these problems are discussed.

Potential, propensity, and categorical realism

I argue that categorical realism, contrary to what most believe today, holds for quantum (and indeed for all) objects and substances. The main argument consists of two steps: (i) the recent experimental verification of the AB effect gives strong empirical evidence for taking quantum potentials as physically real (or substantival), which suggests a change of the data upon which any viable interpretation of quantum theory must rely, and (ii) quantum potentials may be consistently taken as the categorical properties of quantum objects so that categorical realism can be restored.