Heidelberg 2022 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 9: Quantum Mechanics I

AGPhil 9.3: Vortrag

Donnerstag, 24. März 2022, 12:00–12:30, AGPhil-H14

Aristotelian Grounding for GRW's Flash Ontology — •Ryan Miller — University of Geneva, Switzerland

The flash (i.e., event) ontology for the GRW objective-collapse formulation of quantum mechanics (Goldstein et al., 2012) has become popular for maintaining both a primitive ontology in 4D spacetime (Allori et al., 2014; Allori, 2015; Tumulka, 2017) and serious Lorentz invariance (Tumulka, 2009; Petrat & Tumulka, 2014a, 2014b; Tumulka, 2021). Valia Allori's (Allori et al., 2008; Allori, 2016) straightforward reading of this ontology suggests that the flashes are fundamental, grounding both the other elements of the theory and our everyday macro-scale ontology. This view has come under pressure on both points, however: Tim Maudlin (1997, 2010, 2011, 2019) argues that the GRW wavefunction cannot be wholly grounded in the flashes, while Elizabeth Miller (forthcoming) argues that flashes are an inadequate ground for everyday macro-scale ontology.

I suggest resolving these difficulties with the GRW flash ontology by grounding the flashes in entangled macro-objects. On this Aristotelian proposal, macro-objects like Schrodinger's cat maintain the entangled wavefunction that governs their micro-scale powers, realized in flash events. Because entangled particle families flash together (Maudlin, 2011), the density of micro-events will support macro-observations without the GRW parameters departing from observed values (Feldmann & Tumulka, 2012). Neo-Aristotelian grounding is thus attractive for GRW's flash ontology.