Myrvold, Wayne C. (2024) Perspective Duality as a Physical Requirement. [Preprint]
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Abstract
Philosophers of physics, when engaged in matters they regard as fundamental, tend to focus their analyses on fictitious systems that are wholly isolated from their environments. When pressed, they retreat to the fiction of treating the universe as a whole as an object of scientific study. This is nothing at all like the way science is practiced. Even if a system can be insulated in such a way that its interactions with its surroundings are negligible, one only ever explicitly models a minute fraction of the degrees of freedom of the system, and, as the degrees of freedom explicitly considered interact with those that are not, those degrees of freedom that are treated in the model constitute what is, in effect, an open system.
The thought behind this seems to be that this situation is a mere expedient, and that answers to all questions of import are to be found in the investigation of isolated systems. In this paper, I will argue that this is incorrect. Although J. S. Bell was correct to say that a fundamental physical theory should be formulable without recourse to terms such as system, apparatus, and environment, I will argue that any physical theory worth its salt should also be capable of not representing the entire universe, and should admit of a formulation with exogenous parameters. This leads to a stance I call perspective duality.
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| Item Type: | Preprint | ||||||
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| Additional Information: | To appear in Michael Cuffaro and Stephan Hartmann, eds., Open Systems: Physics, Metaphysics, and Methodology (Oxford University Press, 2025). | ||||||
| Keywords: | Open systems, perspective duality, quantum theory. | ||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Causation General Issues > Models and Idealization Specific Sciences > Physics Specific Sciences > Physics > Quantum Field Theory Specific Sciences > Physics > Quantum Mechanics |
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| Depositing User: | Wayne Myrvold | ||||||
| Date Deposited: | 30 Apr 2025 14:07 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 30 Apr 2025 14:07 | ||||||
| Item ID: | 25213 | ||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Causation General Issues > Models and Idealization Specific Sciences > Physics Specific Sciences > Physics > Quantum Field Theory Specific Sciences > Physics > Quantum Mechanics |
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| Date: | November 2024 | ||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/25213 |
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