Existential Inertia and Classical Theistic Proofs by Joseph C. Schmid & Daniel J. Linford

Author:Joseph C. Schmid & Daniel J. Linford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031193132
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

28For example, this is why optical microscopes cannot be used to see single atoms. Atoms are smaller than visible light and are therefore invisible to optical microscopes. Nonetheless, one can produce electrons with a de Broglie wavelength smaller than the radius of an atom. For that reason, electron microscopes can be constructed that can image single atoms.

29Another reason to doubt the literal interpretation of Feynman diagrams is that they misleadingly represent electrons, photons, etc. as objects resembling classical particles. On the literal reading of a Feynman diagram, some electron e1 exchanges momentum with another electron e2 through an intermediate photon. If e1 really were the cause of a change in e2 through an intermediate photon, then we could distinguish the actual world—where e1 emits a photon that is absorbed by e2—from a counterfactual world where e2 emits a photon that is absorbed by e1. However, quantum mechanics—unlike classical mechanics—does not allow us to distinguish the two worlds; physicists say that the actual world is invariant under the exchange of particle labels, while philosophers might say that the electrons do not carry a primitive “thisness” or haecceity in virtue of which the two cases can be distinguished (see Teller (1997, ch. 2) and Schrödinger (1950)). All that we can say is that two electrons interacted; since both possible worlds involve two electrons interacting, they are not actually numerically distinct possible worlds. For purposes of space, though, we won’t explore this reason further.

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