or should “reality” define measurement?
Robert Oerter, on page 83 of his book “The Theory of Almost Everything: The Standard Model, the Unsung Triumph of Modern Physics” said “Quantum mechanics has completely undermined the mechanistic view of the universe, by removing not one but two of its foundations. First, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, it is impossible, even in principle, to determine the exact position and velocity or momentum of each particle in your body. The best that can be done, even for a single particle, is to determine the quantum state of the particle, which necessarily leaves some uncertainty about its position, velocity or momentum. Second, the laws of physics are not deterministic but probabilistic: given the (quantum) state of your body, only the probabilities of different behaviors could be predicted.”
To a certain extent this is true however the same can be said for our inability to determine the exact position and momentum of many macroscopic objects in our environment.
For example in “reality” we can cannot determine or measure the exact position or momentum of the planets as they obit the sun because we do not have the ability, even with modern computers to calculate the gravitational effects all of the other objects in our universe, such as the planets or stars have on them. In other words we can only determine their most probably macroscopic positions or momentum based on an incomplete set of initial conditions. However we do not deny the mechanistic view of planetary science, in part because we can understand or determine the mechanism responsible for why they move the way they do and why we cannot determine their exact position or momentum though observations of the “reality” of our environment. In others words because we define the measurements of their positions and momentum in terms of the “reality” or the ability to observe the conditions under which they interact we assume that they occupy a deterministic environment.
However the reason we view the quantum world as being non-mechanistic is in part because we cannot observe or understand a mechanism responsible for why the components of its environment interact the way they do. Therefore we can only base its “reality” on our inability to measure the position or momentum of its components. In others words we define it only in terms of measurements and not on observations of the conditions of responsible for those measurements.
Yet this is exactly how planetary scientists define the deterministic “reality” of planetary motion because as mentioned earlier, the influence other objects have on them makes it impossible to determine the exact position or momentum of a planet.
Some would say that this is not a valid comparison because we could at least, in theory refine our observations and computing power enough to be able to determine a planets initial conditions precisely enough to predict where it will be in the future.
But that still does not explain why modern science presently assumes that the motion of the planets is mechanistic on a microscopic scale when at the moment is it not.
As mentioned earlier the reason they feel justified in believing that it is, in part because they can define a mechanism in terms of a deterministic “reality” they can observed.
If it was not for this belief they would have to assume that environments the planets occupy fully agree with the non-mechanistic assumptions of quantum mechanics.
However one can define a mechanism in terms of the deterministic “reality” of our observable environment that would explain why the quantum mechanical world appears to be non-deterministic.
For example in the article “Why is energy/mass quantized?” Oct. 4, 2007 it was shown it is possible to understand the quantum mechanical properties of energy/mass by extrapolating the laws of classical resonance in a deterministic three-dimensional environment to a matter wave on a “surface” of a three-dimensional space manifold with respect to a fourth *spatial* dimension.
Briefly it showed the four conditions required for resonance to occur in a classical environment, an object, or substance with a natural frequency, a forcing function at the same frequency as the natural frequency, the lack of a damping frequency and the ability for the substance to oscillate spatial would be meet by a matter wave in four *spatial* dimensions.
The existence of four *spatial* dimensions would give a matter wave the ability to oscillate spatially on a “surface” between a third and fourth *spatial* dimensions thereby fulfilling one of the requirements for classical resonance to occur.
These oscillations would be caused by an event such as the decay of a subatomic particle or the shifting of an electron in an atomic orbital. This would force the “surface” of a three-dimensional space manifold with respect to a fourth *spatial* dimension to oscillate with the frequency associated with the energy of that event.
The oscillations caused by such an event would serve as forcing function allowing a resonant system or “structure” to be established in four *spatial* dimensions.
Classical mechanics tells us the energy of a resonant system can only take on the discrete or quantized values associated with its resonant or a harmonic of its resonant frequency
Therefore the discrete or quantized energy of resonant systems in a continuous form of energy/mass would be responsible for the discrete quantized quantum mechanical properties of particles.
However, that does not explain how the boundaries of a particle’s resonant structure are defined.
In classical physics, a point on the two-dimensional surface of paper is confined to that surface. However, that surface can oscillate up or down with respect to three-dimensional space.
Similarly an object occupying a volume of three-dimensional space would be confined to it however, it could, similar to the surface of the paper oscillate “up” or “down” with respect to a fourth *spatial* dimension.
The confinement of the “upward” and “downward” oscillations of a three-dimension volume with respect to a fourth *spatial* dimension is what defines the geometric boundaries of the “box” containing the resonant system the article “Why is energy/mass quantized?” associated with a particle.
In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle asserts that there a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, such as position x and momentum p, can be simultaneously known.
However, as mentioned earlier one can define a mechanistic “reality” for that environment in terms of the geometry of the four *spatial* dimensions because quantum mechanics mathematically defines the position and momentum of a particle in terms of one dimensional point.
Therefore according to the above concepts there would be an uncertainty in determining its exact position because that one dimensional point could be found any within the volume of the three-dimensional “box” mentioned above.
Similarly there would be an uncertainty in measuring its momentum, again because quantum mechanics defines it in terms of the movement of a one dimensional point. Before one could determine a particle’s momentum one would have to know its exact position in the box at the “end” points were one measured its velocity. However, as mentioned above that non-dimension point representing a particle could be found anywhere in the box containing the resonant structure that define a particle in the article “Why is energy/mass quantized?“ Therefore one could not determine its exact velocity and therefore its momentum because there will always be an uncertainty as to where in the box the non-dimensional point that represents a particle is relative to the dimensions of the “box” when a measurement is taken.
This shows that one can define a deterministic mechanism in terms of the “reality” of our observable environment responsible for the non-deterministic measurements associated with quantum mechanics.
In other words it define a classical mechanismsf or Heisenberg uncertainty principle or why it is impossible, even in principle, to determine the exact position and velocity of each particle in your body.
As mentioned earlier we can cannot determine or measure the exact position or momentum of the planets as they obit the sun because we do not have the ability even with modern computers to calculate the gravitational effects all of the other objects such planet or stars in our universe have on them. However we assume that they occupy mechanistic environment because we can define the measurements of their positions and momentum in terms of the “reality” or the ability to observe the conditions under which they interact.
We can and may never be able precisely measure the momentum and position of particle in a quantum environment however if we assume that the above mechanism is valid then one also has to assume that that environment is mechanistic for the same reasons we assume that the motion of the planets is mechanistic.
What should determines if an environment is mechanistic is not the fact that we can precisely measure the position or momentum of its component because if it was we could not consider the motion of the planets mechanistic because presently we cannot. What determines if an environment is mechanistic is if we can define a valid mechanism in terms of our observable “reality” that can explain and predict why we measure what we do even if we cannot observe all of its components.
If we let our inability to make precise measurements of the position or momentum of the planets or particles define “reality” then we must assume that they do not exist however if we can use our “reality” to define a mechanism responsible for why we cannot precisely make those measurements then must we assume that the environments we are measuring are “real” even though it may be impossible to precisely measure the positions and momentum of their components.
Later Jeff
Copyright Jeffrey O’Callaghan 2014