Zero Point Energy doc
Download 0.97 Mb. View original pdf
|
| ZP OWER C ORPORATION PAGE OF 352 Z ERO P OINT E NERGY thought of physical reality as represented by continuous fields, not mechanically explicable, which are subject to partial differential equations. This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since Newton but it must also be granted that the complete realisation of the programme implied in this idea has not by any means been carried out yet. The successful systems of physics, which have been setup since then, represent rather compromises between these two programmes, which because of their character as compromises bear the mark of what is provisional and logically incomplete, although in some areas they have made great advances. - Of these the first that must be mentioned is Lorentz's theory of electrons, in which the field and electric corpuscles appear beside one another as equivalent elements in the comprehension of reality. There followed the special and general theory of relativity which - although based entirely on field theory considerations-hitherto could not avoid the independent introduction of material points and total differential equations. The last and most successful creation of theoretical physics, quantum mechanics, differs fundamentally in its principles from the two programmes which we will briefly designate as Newton's and Maxwell's. For the quantities which appear in its laws lay no claim to describe physical reality itself but only the probabilities for the occurrence of one of the physical realities to which attention is being directed. Dirac, to whom in my judgement. we are indebted for the most logically complete account of this theory rightly points to the fact that it would not be easy, for example. to give a theoretical description of a photon in such away that there would be comprised in the description sufficient reason fora judgement as to whether the photon will pass a polarisator set obliquely in its path or not. Nevertheless. I am inclined to think that physicists will not be satisfied in the long run with this kind of indirect description of reality, even if an adaptation of the theory to the demand of general relativity can be achieved in a satisfactory way. Then they must surely be brought back to the attempt to realise the programme which may suitably be designated as Maxwellian: a description of physical reality in terms of fields which satisfy partial differential equations in away that is free from singularities. |