Einstein is one of the most famous scientists in history, and one of the most famous equations of this most famous scientist is E=mc2 which, although famous, most people don’t know what it means. It is, of course, the equivalence of mass and energy. But what does that mean?
Ontological indeterminacy is when we don’t have a way to map our conceptual understanding of existence onto actual existence. Or, as Allen Ginsburg defined it: “Ontological indeterminacy (OI) involves incompatible conceptual systems being applicable to a domain with equal empirical adequacy”. But what happens when we don’t have empirical adequacy, such as with quantum field theory and chaos theory?
Continue reading “Quantum Field Theory, Chaos Theory, and Ontological Indeterminacy”
This is a sort of half-baked theory I was playing around with in my head. Maybe someone else will know where to take it from here?
Aristotle defined metaphysics as the study of Being qua Being – or, one might say, studying Being being Being. He says in book VII of his Metaphysics that Being is the individual instances of essence, which is the substance that defines what a thing is in-itself. Now, in our present time, we’ve narrowed down the primary substance further than our everyday sensible objects, down to subatomic particles. Can Aristotle’s philosophy be a useful lens to think about quantum mechanics?
