Are Particles 'Physical Things' or 'Abstract Ideas'?

[Mudhammam]

In between reading Aristotle's treatises on physics, astronomy, biology, psychology, and metaphysics, ethics, and literature, I've detoured into a few modern books on the subjects of biology and physics, namely, Carl Zimmer's At The Water's Edge (a must-read), Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and now I'm on to Julian Barbour's The End of Time. Both of the physics books (granting I haven't yet begun to read the latter but based on impression) seem "out there" to some extent, as in unconventional. Gary Zukav, though he seems very popular with Oprah and the self-help brand of quantum pseudoscience, actually impressed me with The Dancing Wu Li Masters. I was expecting a lot more "woo" but it was a pretty solid, straight-down-the-line physics text that went through the major discoveries of the last 115 years (actually, the book was written in 1979, so of course it didn't include anything from the past 35 years). I'd say about 90-95% was excellent translation of difficult mathematical concepts that physicists have experimentally verified as useful (what 'truth' means scientifically, which is essentially pragmatic) into plain English, and only 5-10% eastern philosophy. That said, there was one thing he wrote that I wanted to get further clarification on (Zukav isn't a physicist but he had five read his manuscript before publication, including David Finklestein, Henry Stapp, and Jack Sarfatti... some of whom have made rather outlandish and controversial claims at times). He said that particles are not actual things. They're ideas. On some level, it seems difficult to see how this could be deemed incorrect when the very notion of discrete objects (particles) that behave like waves and display non-local effects is utterly abstruse and incompatible with everything we directly perceive or are even able to picture when dealing with physical things. The popular physicist Sean Carroll, whom I take to be fairly representative of current mainstream views in physics, also says that we should picture particles to be excitations of energy fields... but what is a field? Is it an abstract construct that we use to predict how events unfold (do they really even 'unfold' in the time-dependent sense we typically mean?) or an actual physical 'thing'? Zukuv quotes a number of monumental discoverers, such as Max Born, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Warner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, David Bohm, John Bell, and John von Neumann, amongst others, as sharing similar sentiments about the idealization of physics and its incompatibility with classical logic. He even quotes Bertrand Russell as saying that "mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true," yet everything beyond the atomic scale is virtually describable only in terms of mathematical concepts. So, what is a particle, or a field, or a wave-function, or a probability-function, or 'collapse,' etc.? Are these representative of real things, or are they merely mental constructs that we find useful in describing our experiences?

[Polaris]

Everything is a particle in one way or another, even energy,

[polar bear]

Great thread Nestor!

I am interested in the responses you get, so I have replied so it shows up in my posts...Thanks!

[Angrboda]

As long as we describe them in the language of mathematics, they will be unreal.

What would it mean to say that a particle is real? How would you describe its realityness?

[Alex K]

Nice topic. I touch on that in my book in the making, but only to the extent that I raise the question and state that I don't dare try answering it. Quantum field theory (of which some of the people you cite weren't really expert because it was fully developed only later) has a very platonic feel to it. The abstract field is like a stencil from which all the particles of a given type derive their properties. Are Fields real? So many different aspects of them can be observed, they con for example have a constant value everywhere which influences particle masses, for example the condensates of the composite pion field and the Higgs field - they seem real and underlying everything. But they could be just an abstraction - what would be the difference. Isn't the criterion for being real that something presents a given set of phenomena? What is the criterion for reality of your choice, can you elucidate?

Now whether particles are real appears to me to be a silly question since particle is a name given to an empirical phenomenon. Hold your photo plate up, and it goes popp and at one spot you got a hit. Bubble chambers show tracks. If particles aren't real, by the same criteria nothing we usually call reality satisfies the conditions for "real" and we become solipsists.

[Mudhammam]

Nice topic. I touch on that in my book in the making, but only to the extent that I raise the question and state that I don't dare try answering it. Quantum field theory (of which some of the people you cite weren't really expert because it was fully developed only later) has a very platonic feel to it. The abstract field is like a stencil from which all the particles of a given type derive their properties. Are Fields real? So many different aspects of them can be observed, they con for example have a constant value everywhere which influences particle masses, for example the condensates of the composite pion field and the Higgs field - they seem real and underlying everything. But they could be just an abstraction - what would be the difference. Isn't the criterion for being real that something presents a given set of phenomena? What is the criterion for reality of your choice, can you elucidate?

Now whether particles are real appears to me to be a silly question since particle is a name given to an empirical phenomenon. Hold your photo plate up, and it goes popp and at one spot you got a hit. Bubble chambers show tracks. If particles aren't real, by the same criteria nothing we usually call reality satisfies the conditions for "real" and we become solipsists.

Thanks for the reply Alex! Your book sounds very interesting, though I'm willing to bet it will be a bit too technical for me (and are you publishing it in English or German?). Even the notion of "quantum field theory," I might point out, almost seems contradictory! (Zukav writes, "A quantum is an indivisible whole. It is a small piece of something, while a field is a whole area of something.") He also talks about bubble chambers and I'd like to get your take on what he (or Bohm) says, though instead of typing out the entire relevant pages I'll just instead take a photograph of the crucial portion (hopefully you can zoom enough to read the text):



As an aside, I'd like to find a serious philosopher of science who tackles the messy New Age marriage of physics and consciousness, especially in regards to issues like "The Measurement Problem" and "The Uncertainty Principle," but the only materialist voice (which is the perspective I'd like to counterbalance the more idealistic views I've read) on the market I have found is Victor Stenger, and judging from some reviews of his work, he doesn't strike me as a very good philosopher (of course, he wasn't one).

I also should point out that from what I gathered Zukav would consider pure experience 'real' rather than our conceptual formulations of it. He says, "According to quantum field theory, fields alone are real. They are the substance of the universe and not 'matter.' Matter (particles) is simply the momentary manifestations of interacting fields which, intangible and insubstantial as they are, are the only real things in the universe" (italics in original), which begs the question: What the F is a field?! And is the mainstream view of physics still materialism (which still seems to be a popular view but perhaps I'm wrong about that)? It's definitely nothing like the materialism that dominated intellectual circles prior to the twentieth-century.

Personally, I'm leaning more and more to the position that ideas and things are equally real but our only measure for the legitimacy of theory is its usefulness in describing substances, and vice versa, our only measure for the legitimacy of substances is their usefulness in describing theory. Wait, huh?

[Anomalocaris]

In so far as they are being discussed, everything is just an idea. We experience perceptions, either using our own given senses only, or having our senses extended by instruments, conditioning or training, We then create ideas in our heads, either using instinctive programming, or through learned practice, to model them.

If we feel our mental idea models the overall milieu of perceptions accurately, we call it real. If we feel uncertain about our idea models, we call it just an idea.

[vorlon13]

"Particle' is just a label or description.  The 'actual' whatsit is potentially unknowable in a direct fashion to our senses.

But as a label or description, particles are useful to our scientists studying these sub micro phenomena.  


Curiously, electrons are really, really, REALLY tiny.  Or so they seem.  IIRC, even now, we don't have good scientifical numbers on just how tiny they might be.  Even 'mathematical' points of zero volume (!) are possible.  How can something exist without a fundamental, basic size how ever small?

Idunno.

I raised this question on a science board some years ago, and though I don't recall the answer, I do recall at the time being impressed that someone else with way more smarts than me had thought about it:

Do we know for a certainty that all electrons everywhere, whatever they basically may be, regardless of their size or lack thereof, are all each and everyone one of them absolutely totally identical to each other ?

Turns out they are, it's a pity I don't recall why . . .

[JuliaL]

---

In between reading Aristotle's treatises on physics, astronomy, biology, psychology, and metaphysics, ethics, and literature, I've detoured into a few modern books on the subjects of biology and physics, namely, Carl Zimmer's At The Water's Edge (a must-read), Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and now I'm on to Julian Barbour's The End of Time. Both of the physics books (granting I haven't yet begun to read the latter but based on impression) seem "out there" to some extent, as in unconventional. Gary Zukav, though he seems very popular with Oprah and the self-help brand of quantum pseudoscience, actually impressed me with The Dancing Wu Li Masters. I was expecting a lot more "woo" but it was a pretty solid, straight-down-the-line physics text that went through the major discoveries of the last 115 years (actually, the book was written in 1979, so of course it didn't include anything from the past 35 years). I'd say about 90-95% was excellent translation of difficult mathematical concepts that physicists have experimentally verified as useful (what 'truth' means scientifically, which is essentially pragmatic) into plain English, and only 5-10% eastern philosophy. That said, there was one thing he wrote that I wanted to get further clarification on (Zukav isn't a physicist but he had five read his manuscript before publication, including David Finklestein, Henry Stapp, and Jack Sarfatti... some of whom have made rather outlandish and controversial claims at times). He said that particles are not actual things. They're ideas. On some level, it seems difficult to see how this could be deemed incorrect when

---

the very notion of discrete objects (particles) that behave like waves and display non-local effects is utterly abstruse and incompatible with everything we directly perceive or are even able to picture when dealing with physical things.

---

The popular physicist Sean Carroll, whom I take to be fairly representative of current mainstream views in physics, also says that we should picture particles to be excitations of energy fields... but what is a field? Is it an abstract construct that we use to predict how events unfold (do they really even 'unfold' in the time-dependent sense we typically mean?) or an actual physical 'thing'? Zukuv quotes a number of monumental discoverers, such as Max Born, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Warner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, David Bohm, John Bell, and John von Neumann, amongst others, as sharing similar sentiments about the idealization of physics and its incompatibility with classical logic. He even quotes Bertrand Russell as saying that "mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true," yet everything beyond the atomic scale is virtually describable only in terms of mathematical concepts.

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So, what is a particle, or a field, or a wave-function, or a probability-function, or 'collapse,' etc.? Are these representative of real things, or are they merely mental constructs that we find useful in describing our experiences?

Fortunately, in interactions with me, they have been shown to be very consistent repeatable mental constructs.  This satisfies my criteria of what is real.  What makes them suspect is that they don't conform to the parochial intuitions we have, a product of our evolutionary heritage, of what an object should be like.  Observation has expanded it's purview beyond the senses with which we are naturally endowed. In the dawning realization that, by any reasonable definition, I am not the center of creation, nor is Earth the center of the universe, there should be the humble acceptance that what is observed can be surprising and counterintuitive.  If past experience is any guide, the universe is not just weirder than we imagine, it is weirder than we can imagine.  Math has been shown a useful tool to describe the non-intuitive, yet consistent characteristics of observed 'reality.'  It is a statement of faith to believe that all unknowns will succumb to mathematical description but, at the moment, it's the best we have.

[Mudhammam]

Thanks for the thoughtful replies everyone. So, what does the materialism label even mean when the definition of matter, arrived at by physics, is that essentially it's nothing describable beyond ingenious, and almost psychedelic, abstract models... and worse, that it can't yet be made consistent with the world of classical objects!? That's really astonishing when you think about it---the PHYSICAL sciences tackling issues like the basic stuff of matter and space-time and whether or not it has a beginning, or is even fundamental, and realizing that either it's not, or that at bottom it's not remotely physical in a sense anyone can really experience... even in imagination!