Abstract
The 20th century history of the particle concept is a story of disillusion. It turned out that in the subatomic domain there are no particles in the classical sense. Neither the atoms, nor their constituent parts, nor the causes of the particle tracks observed in the cloud chamber, nor the pointlike or extended scattering centers within some target matter are classical particles. And it will turn out in the course of this chapter that a generalized concept of quantum particles is not tenable either. Particles are experimental phenomena rather than fundamental entities.
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References
See Brown and Harré 1988, Auyang 1995, Teller 1995, Cao 1999, Kuhlmann et al. 2002.
Born 1926a, 51; translation from Wheeler and Zurek 1983, 54. Here, Born identifies causality and determinism. This identification was attacked by Cassirer in 1937. However, it became influential in the discussion of quantum mechanics.
Quine, On What There Is.
Nachtmann 1990, 3.
Bohr 1913b.
Born 1926a,b.
See Busch et al. 1991, 127–131; Busch et al. 1995, 3 and 59–60.
For Bohr’s complementarity philosophy, see Meyer-Abich 1965; Jammer 1966, 345–361, and 1974, Chap. 4–7; Scheibe 1973, Chap. I; Murdoch 1981; Folse 1985; Honner 1987; Faye 1991; Chevalley 1991; Falkenburg 1998; Pringe 2006.
At least in the domain of non-relativistic quantum mechanics. See Mott 1929 and the discussion in Sect. 5.3.1.
See Newton 1730 vs. Einstein 1905.
Indeed this is true of any relativistic particle or field state; see Clifton and Halvorson 2002. And this is stated by a theorem that derives from very general assumptions about relativistic quantum fields, independently of all operational considerations about the impossibility of localizing particles with lower precision than their Compton wavelength without effects such as pair production.
Bohr 1928, 580.
Locke 1689, Book II, beginning of Chapter XXIII.
See Clifton and Halvorson 2002; see also Sect. 6.6.
See the characterization of a particle theory which Redhead sends ahead of his discussion of the philosophical problems of quantum field theory: “A particle theory attributes to certain individuals (the particles) a variety of properties. These properties will include space-time location.” Redhead 1988, 10. According to this, the current theories of elementary particles are not particle theories.
See Landau and Lifschitz 1987, 1, note 1 and Landau 1988, 2, note 2.
Dirac 1927.
Bjorken and Drell 1965, end of Chap. 12.5.
Heisenberg 1930a, 78, and 1930b, 105; see the discussion in Sect. 5.4.2.
The Casimir effect is the attraction of two metal plates in the vacuum, which is due to the modification of the vacuum state between them; see Itzykson and Zuber 1985, 138–141. In polarization experiments with single photons, two vertically crossed polarizers let no signal pass through, whereas inserting a third, diagonal polarizer makes the signal reappear; see the discussion in Sect. 7.3.3.
Einstein et al. 1935.
See, e.g., Walls and Milburn 1994, 23–26.
Wigner 1939.
Wigner 1939, 151. The ‘usual tensor theory’ is quantum mechanics in Hilbert space.
Heisenberg 1971, 879. My translation. Even in 1975, Heisenberg still wanted to include the scale invariance of deep-inelastic lepton-nucleon scattering (see Sect. 4.3.2) in this approach; see Heisenberg 1976.
Von Weizsäcker 1985, 37–38. My translation. Heisenberg and von Weizsäcker refer to elementary particles as corresponding to the irreducible representations of the respective symmetry groups. This point is taken up again in the next chapter where the parts of matter are discussed.
Streater 1988, 144.
See Wigner 1964, Falkenburg 1988, on the meta-theoretical character of symmetries. In the subsequent particle definitions parity is suppressed for two reasons. The first is theoretical. It turned out that parity conservation is violated in weak interactions. The second is operational. Even though parity is an intrinsic particle property, it cannot be measured for single particles but only at the ensemble level, i.e., from asymmetries in the spatial distribution of many-particle detection.
The coupling is based on the idea of gauge invariance which cannot be explained here. An analysis of this concept is given in Lyre 2004.
In order to describe physical states, it includes mathematical tricks such as normal ordering and time ordering of the operator products; see, e.g., Nachtmann 1990, 108–110, Itzykson and Zuber 1985, 110–111 and 123.
Nachtmann 1990 combines both attitudes. On the one hand, he emphasizes that within the limits of the so-called uncertainty relation between energy and time, noninteracting charged electrons may emit and re-absorb virtual photons (Nachtmann 1990, 99). On the other hand, he points out that the individual contributions to the scattering amplitude (‘elementary processes’) are fictitious: “One must be on one’s guard, however, not to ask when, or how many, elementary processes take place in a particular experiment. This would be a completely meaningless question, since the decomposition of the reaction into elementary processes is a purely theoretical aid for calculating the transition amplitudes.” Nachtmann 1990, 126.
Feynman 1949a,b, 1961.
Feynman 1985; 1987, 10.
Lohrmann 1992, 109. Taking several higher orders into account does not change this result; see Perkins 2000, 41–42.
Lohrmann 1992, 108–109; my translation.
For the following, see Anderson 1997.
Anderson 1997, 97–99.
See Anderson 1997, 15–28.
Anderson 1997, 102. Anderson’s momentum k is the quantity called p = ħk in the other parts of this book.
See Anderson 1997, 102–104.
Anderson 1997, 116. In the following, Anderson mentions that the analogy ends at the divergences of quantum field theory, which fortunately do not occur when calculating the interactions of quasi-particles. Anderson calls only the free electronic charges (type 1) quasi-particles, but not the above quasi-particles of type 2 and 3. I also call them quasi-particles in accordance with the use of the term in current condensed matter physics. This use is justified since all three types have in common that they are approximately independent, quantized, localizable, and due to collective effects.
Anderson 1997, 120.
Gelfert 2003, against Hacking 1983, 22–25.
See Gelfert 2003, referring to Hacking 1983, 22–25 and 265.
Surprisingly, this idea did not have any consequences for the 17th century debate on atomism. Kant’s second antinomy of pure reason is still exclusively expressed in terms of a spatio-temporal part-whole relation. See Kant 1781/87, A 434–437/B 462–465; Falkenburg 2000, 227–239.
Redhead 1988, 15–16, brings several arguments for and against taking the distinction of fermions and bosons as a distinguishing mark of matter constituents or their interactions.
Einstein et al. 1935.
See Pais 1986, 423–425.
This was explanation by unification (Friedman 1974) rather than by a deductive approach. The respective measurement methods are sketched in Sect. 3.3.3.
Bloom et al. 1969, Breidenbach et al. 1969; both reprinted in Cahn and Goldhaber 1989. In 1968 too, one of the phenomenological features of the measured cross-section was large-angle scattering, in perfect analogy with the backward scattering discovered in Rutherford’s laboratory.
See Riordan 1987, 210 and 294–321; Pickering 1984, 184 and 253–279.
Heisenberg 1976, 5.
See Perkins 1987, 20. αS is the coupling constant of the strong interactions, k is a constant.
In 2004, D.J. Gross, H.D. Politzer, and F. Wilzcek received the Nobel prize for developing the basic ideas of quantum chromodynamics, as a theory with asymptotic freedom.
Abe et al. 1995; Abachi et al. 1995. See also Liss et al. 1997; Perkins 2000, 134–138.
However, it may still be argued on Heisenberg’s line of reasoning that in these jet events one only observes the mesons which stem from the fragmentation of the primary quark-antiquark pair, and not the constituent parts of the latter. According to this argument, only a quark-antiquark pair goes through as the cause of the individual causal story. See Fox 2006, Chap. 19. This point is obviously related to the concept of distance involved in the confinement hypothesis, a concept which Heisenberg surely would not have accepted due to its intuitive, heuristic, and analogical character.
See Perkins 1987, 171–181.
See Perkins 2000, 162–192; Povh et al. 1999, 107–111; and Sect. 8.3.
A related ontological approach is trope ontology. See, e.g., Seibt 2002.
See Kant 1786, A 116 (Akad. 4.541–542) and von Weizsäcker 1971, 383–404.
Einstein et al. 1935, Aspect et al. 1982.
See Clifton and Halvorson 2002.
This and other operational features of quantum field theory favor a relational ontology; see Falkenburg 2002a. At this point, the discussion of the ontological aspects of quantum field theory should begin; see Brown and Harré 1988; Auyang 1995; Teller 1995; Cao 1999; Kuhlmann et al. 2002.
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(2007). Metamorphoses of the Particle Concept. In: Particle Metaphysics. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-33732-4_6
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