Attempts to understand better the basic principles of quantum physics continue. Because of the epistemological problems involved, the process is often controversial. The present article attempts to derive quantum mechanics from simple nonquantal postulates.
SIXTY‐SEVEN YEARS AGO Max Planck initiated the quantum age, but its conceptual content still mystifies the student. And the efforts to explain the basic mathematical rules of the theory by developing them from certain fundamental principles (wave‐particle duality and complementarity) beg the question since those rules and principles themselves are of a quantum character. For this reason several theorists have gone one step further in their analysis and have established a system of axioms that do not include any quantum rule explicitly. However the axioms—I refer to the 14 theses of Fritz Bopp in the Heisenberg festschrift and those of Günther Ludwig in his Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik—are of a highly abstract mathematical kind and will hardly satisfy the physicist’s desire for an explanation of the bewildering quantum theory.
With strong magnetic fields and intense lasers or pulsed electric currents, physicists can reconstruct the conditions inside astrophysical objects and create nuclear-fusion reactors.
A crude device for quantification shows how diverse aspects of distantly related organisms reflect the interplay of the same underlying physical factors.
