Description
Book SynopsisPatrick Aidan Heelan's
The Observable offers the reader a completely articulated development of his 1965 philosophy of quantum physics,
Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity. In this previously unpublished study dating back more than a half a century, Heelan brings his background as both a physicist and a philosopher to his reflections on Werner Heisenberg's physical philosophy. Including considerably broader connections to the contributions of Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Albert Einstein, this study also reflects Heelan's experience in Eugene Wigner's laboratory at Princeton along with his reflections on working with Erwin Schrödinger dating from Heelan's years at the Institute for Advanced Cosmology in Dublin.
A contribution to continental philosophy of science, the phenomenological and hermeneutic resources applied in this book to the physical and ontological paradoxes of quantum physics, especially in connection with laboratory science and measurement, theory and m
Table of ContentsContents: Observation, Description and Ontology: Strategy – Relativity: Model of a Scientific Revolution – Quantum Mechanics 1925: Revolution – Wave Mechanics 1926: Reaction – Search for a Paradigm - The Uncertainty Relations: Paradigm or Ontology of Nature? – The Philosophical Differences Between Heisenberg and Bohr – Complementarity - The Chicago Lectures 1929: Complementarity Adopted a Priori Role of Classical Physics – The Gifford Lectures 1955-56 and the New Aristotelianism – The Logical Status of
Potentia – Objectivity and Realism in Quantum Mechanics – Observation, Description, and Ontology.
