Holy philosophical content, Batman!

I had my first lectures today. The philosophy of physics course is looking like it could be really good. We’re looking at the Bohr/Einstein debate at the moment. I’m not quite sure what I think. In a way, I feel like the whole uncertainty/probabilistic thing is a product of a flawed understanding of the world. I don’t know whether I’m with Einstein in wanting the world to be deterministic, but quantum theory seems too strange to be satisfying to me. Perhaps the formalism we use has too many associations with classical physics to really allow the simplicity and unity of quantum phenomena to manifest itself. Perhaps some other formalism might allow a better understanding of what is going on. Something like topos theory or fuzzy logic maybe. I have some papers I downloaded about topos theory and its application to quantum theory, if I track down where I found them I will mention that at a later date.

The genuine metaphysical indeterminacy that Bohr and Heisenberg claimed for quantum experiments doesn’t seem a particularly satisfactory way of resolving the weirdness. Maybe I’m just too “classically minded” to appreciate it. I’ll have to read more to find out what is going on…

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