Abstract
According to ontological reductionism, molecular chemistry refers, at last, to the quantum ontology; therefore, the ontological commitments of chemistry turn out to be finally grounded on quantum mechanics. The main problem of this position is that nobody really knows what quantum ontology is. The purpose of this work is to argue that the confidence in the existence of the physical entities described by quantum mechanics does not take into account the interpretative problems of the theory: in the discussions about the relationship between chemistry and physics, difficulties are seen only on the side of chemistry, whereas matters highly controversial on the side of physics are taken for granted. For instance, it is usually supposed that the infinite mass limit in the Born-Oppenheimer approximation leads by itself to the concept of molecular framework used in molecular chemistry. We will argue that this assumption is implicitly based on an interpretative postulate for quantum mechanics, which, in turn, runs into difficulties when applied to the explanation of the simplest model of the hydrogen atom.
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Notes
We are grateful to W. H. Eugen Schwarz for drawing our attention on this point.
If H tot is degenerate, it does not suffice to univocally define a basis of the Hilbert space, but it is a member of a complete set of commuting observables (CSCO) which univocally defines a basis.
Recently, we have proposed the modal-Hamiltonian interpretation of quantum mechanics (Lombardi and Castagnino 2008, Castagnino and Lombardi 2008, Ardenghi et al. 2009), which explains the fact that L z is not definite-valued in the free hydrogen atom, but acquires a definite value in the case of the Zeeman effect.
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Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to W. H. Eugen Schwarz and the participants of the ISPC Symposium 2008 for their interesting comments. This paper was supported by grants of CONICET, ANPCyT, UBA and SADAF, Argentina.
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Lombardi, O., Castagnino, M. Matters are not so clear on the physical side. Found Chem 12, 159–166 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-010-9090-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-010-9090-9