No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Michael Redhead, From Physics to Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995. Pp. xiii + 92.
Review products
Michael Redhead, From Physics to Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995. Pp. xiii + 92.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Abstract
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
- Type
- Critical Notice
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Authors 1998
References
1 Sagan, Carl The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Random House 1996)Google Scholar
2 See the interview with Colin McGinn, in Horgan, John The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley 1996) 56–9Google Scholar. McGinn argues that the deep problems of philosophy (and presumably science as well) could be forever beyond human capability. I will leave unspoken the obvious retort.
3 Lindley, David The End of Physics: The Myth of a Unified Theory (New York: BasicBooks 1993), 254Google Scholar
4 See Kerszberg, Pierre The Invented Universe: The Einstein-de Sitter Controversy (1916- 17) and the Rise of Relativistic Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon 1989)Google Scholar for extensive documentation of this fact in the case of the development of general relativity.
5 Muller, F.A. ‘Philosophy of Physics for Pedestrians,’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 25 (1994) 505–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 Redhead, Michael Incompleteness, Nonlocality, and Realism: A Prolegomenon to the Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics (Oxford: Clarendon 1987), 48Google Scholar
7 In standard quantum field theory a number of quantities (such as particle rest masses) are calculated to be infinite, in spite of the fact that they have perfectly definite experimental values. One of the major technical innovations during the 1940s was the invention by Feynman, Tomonaga, and Schwinger and others of a technique called renormalization, which is a consistent way of getting around this problem. Opinion tends to be sharply divided as to whether renormalization genuinely solves the problem of the infinities or is merely a clever dodge. See Teller, Paul ‘Infinite Renormalization,’ Philosophy of Science 56 (1989) 238–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a lucid introduction to the problem.
8 Plato, Timaeus, in Timaeus and Critics, Lee, Desmond trans. (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1965), §29, 42Google Scholar
9 Hacking, Ian Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Experimentation and Scientific Realism,’ in Leplin, Jarrett ed., Scientific Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press 1984) 154–72Google Scholar
10 As Hacking famously puts it, ‘physicists believe that electrons are real because they can spray them’ (Representing and Intervening, 23); that is, electrons can be used as tools with which to manipulate or influence something else. I am not sure that this can be honestly claimed, as yet, for quarks; hence Hacking's criterion for the reality of entities may be a little more stringent than Redhead's although they both are in the same spirit.
11 Rorty, Richard ‘Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,’ Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 53 (1980) 719–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; reprinted in Moser, P.K. and Nat, A. vander eds., Human Knowledge: Classical and Contemporary Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1987), 215Google Scholar
12 One of the most instructive examples of the contrast between the relativist's and the realist's approach is the story of the R101 disaster in Shute's, Nevil memoir Slide Rule: The Autobiography of an Engineer (New York: William Morrow 1954)Google Scholar. In 1925 the British Government commissioned a private firm (Vickers) to design and built a prototype passenger-carrying airship, in direct competition with the British Air Ministry's own design team. Vickers produced the R100, a brilliant technical success; the government team, which allowed engineering to be dominated by political considerations, produced the R101, a botched lash-up that crashed on its maiden voyage, killing over 40 persons.
13 Nagel, Thomas The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986)Google Scholar
14 And what is a ‘state’? Mathematically, it is represented by a vector in a complex linear vector space. These vectors are combined in a straightforward Way to give an amplitude for a process to occur; amplitudes (which are complex numbers) may be thought of as a square root of a probability.
15 Wigner, Eugene ‘Remarks on the Mind-Body Question,’ in Good, I.J. ed., The Scientist Speculates (London: Heinemann 1961)Google Scholar; reprinted in Wheeler, J.A. and Zurek, W. eds., Quantum Theory and Measurement (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983)Google Scholar
16 Albert, D. and Loewer, B. ‘Interpreting the Many-Worlds Interpretation,’ Synthese 77 (1988) 195–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see the discussion in Maudlin, Tim Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity: Metaphysical Intimations of Modern Physics (Oxford: Blackwell 1994), 218–20Google Scholar
17 See, e.g, Stapp, H.P. Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics (Berlin: Springer-Verlag 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Einstein, Albert Podolsky, Boris and Rosen, Nathan ‘Can Quantum Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?’ Physical Review 47 (1935) 777–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; reprinted in Wheeler and Zurek, 138-41
19 Bell, J.S. ‘On the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox,’ Physics 1 (1964) 195–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bohm, David Quantum Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall 1951)Google Scholar. It is a matter of acute embarrassment for the international scientific community that neither Bell nor Bohm was awarded the Nobel Prize, even though the groundbreaking significance of their work was quite clear by the times of their deaths in 1990 and 1992 respectively.
20 The Bell Inequalities turn out to be special cases of the ‘conditions of possible experience’ set forth by George Boole. See Pitowsky, I. ‘George Boole's “Conditions of Possible Experience” and the Quantum Puzzle,’ British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (1994) 95–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 This has inspired a spate of puns in the literature, suggested by the phrase. ‘for whom the bell tolls.’
22 The phrase, deliberately ironic, is due to Shimony, Abner ‘Metaphysical Problems in the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics,’ International Philosophical Quarterly 18 (1978) 2–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 By ‘local observable’ we mean an observable that is fully specifiable in terms of measurements made at a point or very small region of space.
24 The way in which Redhead arrives at this conclusion makes appeal to the KochenSpecker paradox. There is a detailed exposition in Redhead's Incompleteness, Nonlocality, and Realism.
25 The violation of OLOC is sometimes referred to in the literature as ‘contextuality,’ a sort of tamed nonlocality.
26 Pauli, W. ‘The Connection Between Spin and Statistics,’ Physical Review 58 (1940) 716–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar
27 Redhead himself has given such a proof; see Incompleteness, Nonlocality, and Realism, 115-16.
28 Peacock, Kent A. ‘Comment on “Tests of Signal Locality and Einstein-Bell Locality for Multiparticle Systems” by S.M. Roy and V. Singh,’ Physical Review Letters 69 (1992) 2733-4CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kennedy, J.B. ‘On the Empirical Foundations of the QuantUm No-Signalling Proofs,’ Philosophy of Science 62 (1995) 543–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar
29 Bohm, D. and Hiley, B.J. The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory (London and New York: Routledge 1993)Google Scholar. Peat, F. David Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley 1997)Google Scholar observes that Bohm's ‘hidden variable approach is essentially a local theory that gives what appear to be nonlocal results!’ (222)
30 Einstein, Albert ‘Principles of Research,’ Bargmann, Sonja trans., in Ideas and Opinions (New York: Crown 1954)Google Scholar; page references to the Dell Laurel (1973) reprint; address originally given to Berlin Physical Society 1918.
31 Hawking, Stephen Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980)Google Scholar
32 Michelson, A.A. Light Waves and Their Uses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1903), 23–4Google Scholar
33 Michelson noted the negative result of his own efforts to determine the motion of the Earth through the ether, and conceded that ether theory was in ‘an unsatisfactory condition’ (163). However, he seemed to think that this was merely a technical difficulty that would soon be cleared up by some clever calculation or model within the existing framework.
34 Einstein, Albert ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,’ Perrett, W. and Jeffery, G.B. trans., Annalen der Physik 17 (1905), 37Google Scholar