Armin Nikkhah Shirazi

This paper makes a case for ontology, the study of existence, to be explicitly and formally incorporated into foundational physics in general and the wave function collapse of quantum mechanics in particular. It introduces a purely ontological distinction between two modes of physical existence-actualizable and actual- into the conventional mathematical representation of the wave function collapse, and examines the implications of doing so, arguing that this may lead to insights that permit one to understand seemingly mysterious aspects of the wave function collapse, such as ???Schro ??dinger???s cat paradox???, as well as how quantum theory in general and Einstein???s general theory of relativity relate to one another. A specific empirical prediction is given, which if confirmed, may move ontology outside the exclusive purview of philosophy

The quantum phase has profound effects on quantum mechanics but its physical origin is currently unexplained. This paper derives its general form from two physical axioms: 1) in the limit in which space goes to zero, spacetime reduces to a constant quantity of areatime, and 2) the proper time dimensions of areatime and of spacetime are orthogonal but can be compared to each other according to what will here be called an angular dual bilateral symmetry. The mathematical derivation and the explanation of the physical origin of the quantum phase from these two axioms is straightforward and implies that the quantum phase is intimately related to the quantization of spacetime

An important debate in the philosophy of science, whether an instrumentalist or realist view of science correctly characterizes science, is examined in this paper through the lens of a related debate, namely whether science is a social construct or not. The latter debate arose in response to Kuhn's work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he argued that while there exists a process through which scienti c understanding evolves from primitive to increasingly re ned ideas, it does not describe progress 'toward' anything. Kuhn's work was then used to argue that there is no such thing as a knowable objective reality, a view much in agreement with that of the instrumentalist. This paper argues that a generalized version of the correspondence principle applied to a the- ory's domain of validity is an exclusive feature of science which distinguishes it from socially constructed phenomena and thereby supports the realist position. According to this argument, progress in science can be characterized as the replacement of old paradigms by new ones with greater domains of validity which obey the correspondence principle where the two paradigms overlap. This characterization, however, is susceptible to the instrumentalist objection that it does not t the transition from Aristotelian to Newtonian physics. In response, it is required that this argument depend on the intactness of certain core concepts in the face of experimental challenge within some regions of the theory's original domain of validity. While this requirement saves the argument and even o ers an answer to the question of what it would take for our most established theories in physics, relativity and quantum theory, to su er the same fate as Aris- totelian physics, it also defers a conclusive resolution to the debate between instrumentalists and realists until it can be determined whether an ultimate theory of nature can be found.

The predominant approaches to understanding how quantum theory and General Relativity are related to each other implicitly assume that both theories use the same concept of mass. Given that despite great efforts such approaches have not yet produced a consistent falsifiable quantum theory of gravity, this paper entertains the possibility that the concepts of mass in the two theories are in fact distinct. It points out that if the concept of mass in quantum mechanics is defined such that it always exists in a superposition and is not a gravitational source, then this sharply segregates the domains of quantum theory and of general relativity. This concept of mass violates the equivalence principle applied to active gravitational mass, but may still produce effects consistent with the equivalence principle when applied to passive gravitational mass by the correspondence principle applied to a weak field in the appropriate limit. An experiment that successfully measures the gravity field of quantum objects in a superposition, and in particular of photons, would not only falsify this distinction but also constitute the first direct empirical test that gravity must in fact be described fundamentally by a quantum theory