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Originally Posted by TINNY
Sanctus, I still don't understand.You're going round in circles here. Is the implicatoins of quantum mechanics scientific or philosophical? What difference is there between implications and consequences?
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It's both scientific and philosophic, for me they are strongly married.
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Originally Posted by TINNY
Hey, what do you mean by philosophy here? How can philosophy help understand QM? I thought the scientific discovery came first, then the philosophical implications of it.
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You're right scientific discory comes first..... sometimes; in the case of quantum mechanics you can't really say what came first. It all started by trying to explain the radiation of a black body, which is very scientific. Planck found an explanation which needed the quantification of the frequency (i.e h*nu=n with n a natural number) of emission, which is still very scientific. But this isn't yet the QM,it's the starting point of the theory to which usually it's referred to as the "old quantum theory" . Now at this stage, philosophy comes into the reasoning. Somebody (I think still Planck) thinks about the universe, the particles, how it could and couldn't be a comes up with the idea that particles have as well a quantified frequency (after the model from DeBroglie to every particle one can associate a wave length and therefore a frequency). This means that the energy of a particle isn't continuos, but has to be quantified. Well, in our daily life the energy of any object seems to be continuos, but this theory says not. The only way you can get out of that Dilemma and start to understand what is going on is that you sart to philosophize of its implications.
That's exactly what Bohr, Planck,Einstein, Heisenberg,Schrödinger, Sommerfeld and friends did and so they eventually got to the theory today called QM.
Just about the philosophical need to interprete the probability thingy of my earlier post: until that people used to think that the universe was deterministic, well after QM you cannot (and not because we are not smart enough!!) predict how the universe will be in 4 seconds! Tell me how can you understand that without recurring to philosophy? You may just say mathematics and experiences proves it to be so, but then then you understand it and what it implies? To understand it you have really to think, to philosophize about it and its implications and then you may come up with something new.
