Gao, Shan
(2022)
Reality of mass and charge and its implications for the meaning of the wave function.
[Preprint]
Abstract
What is the ontological status of mass and charge in a realist quantum theory? This has been an important but debated issue in the foundations of physics. In this paper, I present a new analysis of the reality of mass and charge and its implications for the ontological meaning of the wave function. First, I argue that mass and charge should be included in the ontology of a psi-ontic theory. In particular, for an N-body system, there are N different physical entities with respective masses and charges in three-dimensional space. Next, I argue that a field ontological interpretation of the wave function such as wave function realism or the multi-field interpretation, which usually regards mass and charge as constants of nature, cannot accommodate mass and charge in its ontology. Third, I argue that in order to include mass and charge in the ontology for entangled states, the physical entities must be particles whose motion is discontinuous. Finally, I introduce the RDM of particles interpretation of the wave function, according to which a quantum system is composed of particles with mass and charge which undergo random discontinuous motion (RDM) in three-dimensional space, and the wave function represents the propensities of these particles which determine their random discontinuous motion.
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