Erwin Schrödinger

The lexeme veloziferisch (velociferian) was first coined by Goethe in an unsent letter from 1825 and entered the public stage four years later with the second edition of the novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, oder die Entsagenden (1829; Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, or The Renunciants). As a portmanteau, the neologism, which is composed of the Italian velocità and the German luziferisch, combines two central elements of the Goethean imaginary: the accelerated velocity of modern life and the “luciferian” function of negation. Das Veloziferische marks a dangerous speed at which organic growth is outpaced by the rapid acceleration of technological development. At velociferian speeds, the otherwise figurative role of negation in Goethe’s philosophy of nature takes on a disfiguring function, highlighted most clearly by the techno-accelerationist allegory Faust. The invention of this term has prompted recent investigations into the relationship between technological development and social acceleration in modernity. Furthermore, an appreciation of Goethe’s critique of the velociferian enables a fuller understanding of his unique position in relation to broader trends in natural philosophy and the philosophy of biology (Spinoza, Schelling, and Erwin Schrödinger), in addition to the philosophy of technology (Thomas Carlyle and Bruno Latour).

À partir d'une réflexion sur la mécanique statistique de Boltzmann, Schrödinger développe une critique du rationalisme mécaniste qui le conduit à adopter une approche ensembliste, ou "holiste", des phénomènes de la nature. La mise en œuvre de cette approche dans le cadre des sciences de la nature débouche sur un retour à une physique du continu et à une interprétation exclusivement ondulatoire de la mécanique quantique, en complet désaccord avec l'interprétation de l'École de Copenhague. L'approche ensembliste mise en œuvre au niveau de la science renvoie à une conception elle-même "ensembliste" de la compréhension par laquelle Schrödinger cherche à justifier ses positions scientifiques et qui a pour effet, au rebours du positivisme, de placer les sciences dans la dépendance des sciences de l'esprit : de même que c'est seulement au sein d'un monde et d'une tradition que l'homme peut comprendre, c'est seulement rapportée à une totalité sociale et historique qu'une théorie peut être comprise et donc jugée. Ce parti est alors associé, dans ses conséquences, à une aporie dont témoignent les aspects à la fois novateurs et, selon certains, rétrogrades de l'interprétation exclusivement ondulatoire de la mécanique quantique : celle de l'impossible conciliation du dépassement et de la fidélité au passé à laquelle se heurte inévitablement toute critique de la modernité.

were the two major founders of "new quantum theory" in the period 1925-1927. Their formulations were very different, and neither of them liked the other's formulation. Heisenberg, in a letter, called Schrödinger's formulation "repulsive," and characterized the physical interpretation as "crap."1 Schrödinger, without obscenity but in print, returned the compliment, saying he was "repelled" by Heisenberg's formulation and that it was "monstrous." 2 The two formulations were later proved to be equivalent. (Some qualifications must be added. Dirac, over three decades later, while recording his version of the equivalence proof to Thomas Kuhn, who was collecting interviews with the founders, claim that in systems with an infinite number of dimensions a term in the exponent did not carry over.)3 Despite their differences, both Heisenberg and Schrödinger were well-aware of the novelties and apparent paradoxes of the new quantum mechanics. complex valued terms, multidimensional character, was novel and counterintuitive. Heisenberg, allying himself with Bohr accepted these features as intrinsic to the subatomic world, while Schrödinger unsuccessfully attempted initially and successfully tried to further retrieve features of classical mechanics and to formulate wave mechanics in a continuous and deterministic form without quantum jumps, in "Are There Quantum Jumps?"4 Because of Schrödinger's continued support of the Law of Continuity and criticism of superposition he did not find the new quantum mechanics as radical a change from classical physics as much as Heisenberg. This may account of Schrödinger's interest not so much in the metaphysics of the Presocratics as was Heisenberg's, but in objectivity and knowledge common to all. But despite their differences in attitude toward the canonical form of the theory, both felt that quantum mechanics upset classical physics required new approaches to understanding different from those of classical particle physics such as atomism of particles. Schrödinger in a chapter titled "The Motives for Returning to Ancient Thought" states that in modern physics "The very foundations are shaken," and that "Quantum theory while extending atomism almost limitlessly, has plunged into a crisis more severe than most people are prepared to admit.5

Hacemos una genealogía del concepto filosófico de "Dios" en la filosofía griega antigua, de Parménides a Plotino pasando por Platón y el motor inmóvil de Aristóteles. Luego mencionamos el modo como el concepto fue apropiado por las grandes religiones monoteístas en su periodo de formación, particularmente visible en la doctrina de la trinidad cristiana. Mostramos la actualidad del concepto parmenídeo-aristotélico de "Dios" para el físico Erwin Shrödinger y el lógico Alfred North Whitehead.

This book is about scientific understanding. It is widely acknowledged that a central aim of science is to achieve understanding of the world around us, and that possessing such understanding is highly important in our present-day society. But what does it mean to achieve this understanding? What precisely is scientific understanding? These are philosophical questions that have not yet received satisfactory answers. While there has been an ongoing debate about the nature of scientific explanation since Carl Hempel advanced his covering law model in 1948, the related notion of understanding has been largely neglected because most philosophers regarded understanding as merely a subjective byproduct of objective explanations. By contrast, this book puts scientific understanding center stage. It is primarily a philosophical study, but also contains detailed historical case studies of scientific practice. In contrast to most existing studies in this area, it takes into account scientists’ views and analyzes their role in scientific debate and development. The aim of the book is to develop and defend a philosophical theory of scientific understanding that can describe and explain the historical variation of criteria for understanding actually employed by scientists. The theory does justice to the insights of such famous physicists as Werner Heisenberg and Richard Feynman, while bringing much-needed conceptual rigor to their intuitions. The scope of the proposed account of understanding is the natural sciences: while the detailed case studies derive from physics, examples from other sciences are presented to illustrate its wider validity.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction: The desire to understand
2. Understanding and the aims of science
3. Explanatory understanding: A plurality of models
4. A contextual theory of scientific understanding
5. Intelligibility and metaphysics: Understanding gravitation
6. Models and mechanisms: Physical understanding in the nineteenth
7. Visualizability and intelligibility: Insight into the quantum world
8. Conclusion: The many faces of understanding

Is it possible that the most famous critic of quantum mechanics actually
invented most of its fundamentally important concepts?

In his 1905 Brownian motion paper, Einstein quantized matter,
proving the existence of atoms. His light-quantum hypothesis showed
that energy itself comes in particles (photons). He showed energy and
matter are interchangeable, E = mc2. In 1905 Einstein was first to see
nonlocality and instantaneous action-at-a-distance. In 1907 he saw
quantum “jumps” between energy levels in matter, six years before
Bohr postulated them in his atomic model. Einstein saw wave-particle
duality and the “collapse” of the wave in 1909. And in 1916 his transition
probabilities for emission and absorption processes introduced ontological chance when matter and radiation interact, making quantum
mechanics statistical. He discovered the indistinguishability and
odd quantum statistics of elementary particles in 1925 and in 1935
speculated about the nonseparability of interacting identical particles.

It took physicists over twenty years to accept Einstein’s light-quantum.
He explained the relation of particles to waves fifteen years before
Heisenberg matrices and Schrödinger wave functions. He saw
indeterminism ten years before the uncertainty principle. And he saw
nonlocality as early as 1905, presenting it formally in 1927, but was
ignored. In the 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper, he explored nonseparability, which was dubbed “entanglement” by Schrödinger. EPR
has gone from being ignorable to become Einstein’s most cited work:
the basis for today’s “second revolution in quantum mechanics.”

In a radical revision of the history of quantum physics, Bob Doyle
develops Einstein’s idea of objective reality to resolve several of
today’s most puzzling quantum mysteries, including the two-slit
experiment, quantum entanglement, and microscopic irreversibility.

Erwin Schrödinger is an Austrian physicist of the XXth century who took part in the elaboration of quantum mechanics and offered some alternatives to the Copenhagen interpretation. This thesis shows the whole of his thought to shed light on the origins of his wrongly understood opinions. His ontology consists of a universal-Spirit monism combined with a strong interest in the evolution of species, which lead to a double definition of consciousness : seen as a supra-individual memory in the broadest sense and as a synonym for attention in the narrower sense. A key theme of his thought is identity, from which it follows that classical bodies have a formal identity, as for quantum bodies, which are treated in a holistic way and reduced to observables. With regard to the theory of knowledge he requires the possibility to form clear images of theoretical elements, even though they don’t reflect any objective reality, and this is one of the reasons why he confronts the Copenhagen school. He reports a set of inconsistencies within quantum theory, which are presented in this work, and remained unsolved. This allows us to conclude that it is necessary to get back over these unsolved issues.

Kuantum mekaniğine olan katkılarıyla şöhret bulan Erwin Schrödinger (1887 – 1961), fizikçi-filozoftur. Fizik profesörü olması hasebiyle asıl çalışmaları fizik hakkında olsa da Doğa ve Yunanlar & Bilim ve Hümanizm, Yaşam Nedir? ve Dünya Görüşüm gibi kitaplarında çeşitli felsefî konuları ele almıştır. Schrödinger’in esas gayesi insanı tanımak olup çalışmalarında insanın özgür iradesini temel mesele kılmaktadır. Nitekim ona göre bütün bilimler, “biz kimiz?” sorusuna cevap verdiği ölçüde değerlidir. Doğa ve Yunanlar & Bilim ve Hümanizm’de Modern fiziğin köklerini veya günümüzdeki halini incelese de onun birincil amacı, bugün insanlık adına bilimin cevap veremediği sorulara Antik Yunan düşünürlerinin nasıl yüzleştiklerini araştırarak insanı tanıma yolunda ilerlemektir.

Paradoja y serendipia en la cultura cuántica dominicana

Un ejercicio imaginario en el que converjan la paradoja y la serendipia, en el que ames y no ames a una mujer, a la vez, porque buscando sus besos, habrás encontrado otra boca.

https://acento.com.do/opinion/paradoja-y-serendipia-en-la-cultura-cuantica-dominicana-9072201.html

1900 was a remarkable year for science. Several ground-breaking events took place, in physics, biology and psychology. Planck introduced the quantum concept, the work of Mendel was rediscovered, and Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. These events heralded the emergence of completely new areas of inquiry, all of which greatly affected the intellectual landscape of the 20th century, namely quantum physics, genetics and psychoanalysis. What do these developments have in common? Can we discern a family likeness, a basic affinity between them, so that we can use the one to deepen our understanding of the other? One common denominator is that they open up realms of inquiry that are significantly different from the world of everyday experience, namely the realm of elementary particles, of genes and genomes, and of the unconscious. But to what extent can we meaningfully argue, for instance, that the genome is the biological unconscious, and the unconscious the psychic genome? To address these question, I will build on the work of two key intellectual figures who have explored the affinities of these developments in depth, namely Erwin Schrödinger (a quantum physicist and avid reader of Schopenhauer who initiated molecular biology) and Jacques Lacan (who reframed the specificity of psychoanalysis with the help of 20th century science: the era of structural linguistics, but also of quantum physics, molecular biology, bioinformatics and DNA.

This paper addresses three paradoxes of biomimicry. First of all: how can biomimicry be as old as technology as such and at the same time decidedly innovative and new? Secondly: how can biomimicry both entail a " naturalisation " of technology and a " technification " of nature? And finally: how can biomimicry be perceived as nature-friendly but at the same time (potentially at least) as a pervasive biotechnological assault on nature? Contemporary (techno-scientific) biomimicry, I will argue, aims to mimic nature on the level of bio-molecular processes and structures: contemporary biomimicry as micro-biomimicry. Moreover, building on Aristotle, Delbrück and Schrödinger, I will emphasise that what is mimicked by contemporary (techno-scientific) biomimicry, in contrast to traditional (artisanal) instances of biomimicry, is not the morphological form (εἶδος), but rather the program or formula (λόγος) of living systems. Contemporary biomimicry is " in accordance with nature " , but not in the tradition sense. Rather, building on decades of biomolecular research, it strives to reconcile nature and technology against the backdrop of advanced technicity. But biomimetics will only achieve its goals if it is not pursued purely as a technological endeavour, but complemented by an ethos of sustainability and respect for nature. These claims will be elucidated with the help of two case studies: a research project (namely the BaSyC project, launched in 2017 and aimed at producing a synthetic cell) and a science novel (namely Solar, revolving around the epistemic and moral challenges involved in artificial photosynthesis).

El paper central d’Schrödinger en l’adveniment de la Mecànica Quàntica és àmpliament reconegut pel relat històric oficial. Menys conegudes són, però, les grans diferències que va mantenir amb el corrent majoritari de la física teòrica un cop establerta aquesta teoria. La seva lluita (1935-1961) es va centrar a revisar les bases de la teoria quàntica, posant un èmfasi especial en la interpretació. En aquest article elaborem un esquema històric dels arguments que va aportar, principalment en relació amb la qüestió de la constitució elemental de la matèria. Argumentem que les idees tardanes d’Schrödinger.

Many physicists wonder at the usefulness of mathematics in physics. For instance, Einstein, Jeans, Wigner, Dirac, Barrow and many others.
Wondering at the usefulness of mathematics in the physical description of reality is understandable indeed, if we assume that the laws, hypotheses and theories do describe, represent or mirror Nature. But the fact that these physical constructs are sometimes empirically acceptable is no compelling reason  for claiming that they are are true or verisimilar representations of the independent reality. The inference from empirical success to truth is logically illegitimate.
In particular it is sometimes claimed that mathematical physics attemps to simulate reality by means of theoretical models. But as the history of physics shows, it is perfectly possible to have different models for the same domain of phenomena, both empirically successful and based on entirely different assumptions. Thus theoretical models cannot be supposed to represent or simulate the reality.
If instrumentalism about theories and theoretical models is adopted instead of realism in the philosophy of science, then the alleged unreasonable usefulness of mathematical for the physical description of reality becomes less alarming. And this has important consequences for the doctrine of theoretical explanation.

Is it possible that the most famous critic of quantum mechanics actually invented most of its fundamentally important concepts? In his 1905 Brownian motion paper, Einstein quantized matter, proving the existence of atoms. His light-quantum hypothesis showed that energy itself comes in particles (photons). He showed energy and matter are interchangeable, E = mc2. In 1905 Einstein was first to see nonlocality and instantaneous action-at-a-distance. In 1907 he saw quantum “jumps” between energy levels in matter, six years before Bohr postulated them in his atomic model. Einstein saw wave-particle duality and the “collapse” of the wave in 1909. And in 1916 his transition probabilities for emission and absorption processes introduced ontological chance when matter and radiation interact, making quantum mechanics statistical. He discovered the indistinguishability and odd quantum statistics of elementary particles in 1925 and in 1935 speculated about the nonseparability of interacting identical particles. It took physicists over twenty years to accept Einstein’s light-quantum. He explained the relation of particles to waves fifteen years before Heisenberg matrices and Schrödinger wave functions. He saw indeterminism ten years before the uncertainty principle. And he saw nonlocality as early as 1905, presenting it formally in 1927, but was ignored. In the 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper, he explored nonseparability, which was dubbed “entanglement” by Schrödinger. EPR has gone from being ignorable to become Einstein’s most cited work: the basis for today’s “second revolution in quantum mechanics.” In a radical revision of the history of quantum physics, Bob Doyle develops Einstein’s idea of objective reality to resolve several of today’s most puzzling quantum mysteries, including the two-slit experiment, quantum entanglement, and microscopic irreversibility.

Artigo de Fernanda Dechatnek publicado na revista Cadernos PetFilosofia, "Filosofia e Ativismo", 2020, vol. 18, No 2. Disponível em: https://revistas.ufpr.br/petfilo/issue/view/3005/showToc
Resumo: Procuramos explorar o potencial das criações humanas visando dar algum prospecto para a questão da entropia e sua irreversibilidade de acordo com as definições da termodinâmica. Para tanto, seguindo a relação de ordem e desordem que explicam a entropia em Erwin Schrödinger, traça-se uma comparação entre os tipos de criação e quais caminhos elas podem tomar em via de acelerar ou retardar a morte térmica do Universo. A partir disso, em via de explorar melhor a atividade neguentrópica da criatividade, utilizando como apoio o artigo de Monique Allain, relaciona-se o modo como a arte consegue ressaltar essa atividade afastando-nos da irreversibilidade do sistema. Neste ponto, o rumo tomado para explicitar a atuação artística são as técnicas de dança dos coreógrafos contemporâneos Pina Bausch e Merce Cunningham, tendo como base a apresentação de ambos pela perspectiva filosófica de José Gil.

This essay introduces the transcription and translation of Paul Feyerabend's Der Begriff der Verständlichkeit in der modernen Physik [The concept of intelligibility in modern physics] (1948), which is an early essay written by Paul Feyerabend in 1948 on the topic of intelligibility (Verständlichkeit) and visualizability (Anschaulichkeit) of physical theories. The existence of such essay was likely. It is listed in his bibliography as his first publication. Yet the content of the essay was unknown, as no original or copy is extant in Feyerabend's Nachlass and no known published version was available to the communityduntil now. The essay has both historical and philosophical interest: it is, as far as our current knowledge goes, Feyerabend's earliest extant publication. It documents Feyerabend's philosophical interest as a physicist-to-be, in what he himself called his " positivist " phase; and it gives a rare if fragmentary insight into the early discussions of the 'Third Vienna Circle' and, more generally, the philosophical culture of discussion in Vienna.