Physical Experiments

By: Sharon White
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:26:58
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We are here faced with an epistemological problem quite new in natural philosophy, where all description of experiences has so far been based upon the assumption, already inherent in ordinary conventions of language, that it is possible to distinguish sharply between the behaviour of objects and the means of observation. This assumption is not only fully justified by all everyday experience but even constitutes the whole basis of classical physics, which, just through the theory of relativity, has received such a wonderful completion. As soon as we are dealing, however, with phenomena like individual atomic processes which, due to their very nature, are essentially determined by the interaction between the objects in question and the measuring instruments necessary for the definition of the experimental arrangements, we are, therefore, forced to examine more closely the question of what kind of knowledge can be obtained concerning the objects. In this respect we must, on the one hand, realize that the aim of every physical experiment-to gain knowledge under reproducible and communicable conditions-leaves us no choice but to use everyday concepts, perhaps refined by the terminology of classical physics, not only in all accounts of the construction and manipulation of the measuring instruments but also in the description of the actual experimental results.

On the other hand, it is equally important to understand that just this circumstance implies that no result of an experiment concerning a phenomenon which, in principle, lies outside the range of classical physics can be interpreted as giving information about independent properties of the objects, but is inherently connected with a definite situation in the description of which the measuring instruments interacting with the objects also enter essentially. This last fact gives the straightforward explanation of the apparent contradictions which appear when results about atomic objects obtained by different experimental arrangements are tentatively combined into a self-contained picture of the object. Information regarding the behaviour of an atomic object obtained under definite experimental conditions may, however, according to a terminology often used in atomic physics, be adequately characterized as complementary to any information about the same object obtained by some other experimental arrangement excluding the fulfilment of the first conditions. Although such kinds of information cannot be combined into a single picture by means of ordinary concepts, they represent indeed equally essential aspects of any knowledge of the object in question which can be obtained in this domain. The recognition of such a complementary character of the mechanical analogies by which one has attempted to visualize the individual radiative effects has, in fact, led to an entirely satisfactory solution of the riddles of the properties of light alluded to above. In the same way it is only by taking into consideration the complementary relationship between the different experiences concerning the behaviour of atomic corpuscles that it has been possible to obtain a clue to the understanding of the striking contrast between the properties of ordinary mechanical models and the peculiar laws of stability governing atomic structures which form the basis for every closer explanation of the specific physical and chemical properties of matter.

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