Quantum Mechanics: the Basics I

This course represents the chance to overcome the tragic divide between philosophy and physics that set in about 1700! Recall that in the seventeenth century they were unified as ‘natural philosophy’. Sadly, since 1700 a succession of factors have pushed them apart, and kept them apart. For example: (i) the increasing technicality of physics after the Newtonian synthesis of 1687; (ii) the coming of transcendental philosophy in Kant and his legacy; (iii) the early analytic philosophers, including logical empiricists, being overly enthusiastic about the power of logic to solve philosophical problems, and overly sceptical of traditional metaphysics and epistemology —just when the relativity and quantum revolutions were offering philosophers wonderful material for metaphysical and epistemological assessment; (iv) analytic philosophy’s desire to have a distinctive intellectual and institutional identity (not least because cognate subjects that it was institutionally tied to, like psychology, were ‘growing up and leaving’) was most easily satisfied by alighting on ‘conceptual analysis’ of one sort or another ... (v) the limitations of pedagogy! One cannot in three or four years learn both (a) the canonical philosophers in the humanistic tradition, and (b) enough physics (or science in general) to read the canonical natural philosophers—of which they were many after Newton’s time: and a handful of giants, e.g. Euler, Helmholtz, Maxwell, Einstein....