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what is the difference between metaphysics and quantum physics

in my POV:

metaphysics (most properly: ontology) is about the meaning of Being [i.e. what does "Being" mean].
science (incl. quantum physics) is about beings/entities.


There are many different conceptions of metaphysics in the history of philosophy (wikipedia for: Aristotle, medieval metaphysics, Descartes, Kant, Hegel).

The "meta" doesn't necessarily mean that which goes beyond "experience" (as going to another reality, or questioning about the super-natural which can't be observed).

The most proper task for metaphysics "ought to be" providing grounds for the sciences, and thinking about their presuppositions and conditions of possibility (as transcendental philosophy).
 
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^^^But maybe you can tell us what you think both are, and why you presume both are the same, or why you are confused. Someone can help you much better in this way.

That's probably way more constructive than people bombing this thread with their background knowledge. :)
 
Metaphysics is philosophy, and existed before quantum physics. Quantum physics is science.

Quantum physics is still just physics, metaphysics means the physics of physics; or the non-empirical origin and rules to physics that cannot be determined empirically (e.g. scientifically). It can also be translated as "beyond physics"

Metaphysics includes immaterial Berkeleyan idealism, occasionalism, and theories which deny the existence of physics altogether.
 
In the preface of Immanuel Kant's "Metaphysics of Ethics" as translated by Thomas Abbott:

We may call philosophy empirical, so far as it is based on grounds of experience: on the other hand, that which delivers its doctrines from à priori principles alone we may call pure philosophy. When the latter is merely formal it is logic; if it is restricted to definite objects of the understanding it is metaphysic.

In this way there arises the idea of a two-fold metaphysic - a metaphysic of nature and a metaphysic of morals. Physics will thus have an empirical and also a rational part. It is the same with Ethics; but here the empirical part might have the special name of practical anthropology, the name morality being appropriated to the rational part.
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Quantum physics makes predictions like "the ionization energy of hydrogen is 13.6 electron volts", that can be tested by experiment, and turn out to be correct.

Metaphysics is not experimental. You can only present convincing arguments for or against metaphysical statements, and no experimental proof.

The reason why quantum mechanics is often thought to have connections with the mystical and metaphysical is that some aspects of it are somewhat unintuitive to everyday reasoning. For example, a quantum particle can be "in two places at the same time", until someone measures it's position and the state of the particle "collapses" to being in only one place.
 
polymath said:
The reason why quantum mechanics is often thought to have connections with the mystical and metaphysical is that some aspects of it are somewhat unintuitive to everyday reasoning. For example, a quantum particle can be "in two places at the same time", until someone measures it's position and the state of the particle "collapses" to being in only one place.
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Which is more 'mysticism' than metaphysics anyhow. So called "new age metaphysics", or momentary fancy by means of mysticism, which really has nothing to do with traditional Aristotlean decended logician metaphysics.
 
Amphetamine allowed me to write this... You may find it enlightening; although it is not comprehensive regarding the distinction between metaphysics and modern physics, I do go in depth explaining their relation to one another:

You could perhaps view metaphysics as the predecessor of theoretical physics (not just quantum physics), since metaphysics sought to answer questions regarding the inherent nature and origins of the universe, but not through scientific experimentation.
Metaphysics was more prevalent in before the 20th century - an explanation as to why philosophers were attempting to solve such problems and not scientists is because there was no equipment back then for testing the hypotheses of such subjects. Hence, metaphysics was mostly a guessing game - using dichotomy to construct a very crude epistemology with logic alone as the tool for crafting it.

Also, the line between "science", "philosophy", and "religion" becomes more and more vague the further you go back in history. The cosmogony and pagan religion of some early Egyptian nations (for example, the Ogdoad) could actually be better defined as an early science rather than a religion, one which hypothesized the origins of the universe - producing an explanation that is not too far removed from modern theoretical physics (if we consider the context of ancient Egypt).

Thus, Nietzsche (having noted this intrinsic link between science and religion) said something along the lines of "our new contemporary science is not replacing the ascetic ideal, it is simply the latest, purest, and most noble form of it. Can you grasp that?" People often misinterpret this as Nietzsche calling science a new religion, when actually Nietzsche was simply pointing out that religion was the science of the past. Our current understanding of physics is nothing more than the latest paradigm of a long series of paradigms comprised of what we now consider "Ancient religions", "occult", "pagan", "alchemy", etc. New editions of the human species' collective scientific paradigm are more or less complex based solely on a reflection of that civilization/era's technology.

I would like to note one event in history that may serve as a good example: the arrival of the Spanish in South America and their discovery of the Coca Plant. The indigenous people's of the region told the Spanish that chewing the coca leaf would energize and empower the individual, and that the plant also had healing and medicinal properties. At first the Spanish didn't believe them and thought that chewing the coca leaf was just some demonic pagan ritual performed by the tribe. Of course later on, the Spanish did in fact discover the stimulating effects of the coca leaf, followed by the Spanish subsequently harvesting it and taxing it. The point being that the current scientific paradigm will dismiss the science they don't understand of older or less technologically advanced paradigms as being of supernatural, superstitious, or "evil" origins. A frightening conclusion being that many ancient superstitions, beliefs, and practices all had practical application - even those as bizarre as mummification, cannibalism, worshipping of leaders as gods, and human sacrifice; most of which had some sort of relevance to the evolutionary process of sexual selection (a knowledge of which has long since been forbidden by Judaistic religions, and ultimately forgotten).

I think we could now perhaps appreciate a concept fictionally presented in the movie "The Lawnmower Man" - "I've been realizing that nothing we're doing is new. We aren't tapping into new areas of the brain, we are simply awakening the most ancient".

Perhaps I have digressed slightly from the original topic of metaphysics and theoretical physics, but all of what I have just discussed is essential for an in-depth analysis of the differences between metaphysics and theoretical physics.

Just as the Ancient Egyptian Ogdoad had hypothesized the universe origin's necessitating elements such as "chaos" or asymmetry in the initial dynamic conditions, so does modern physics hypothesize the necessity for "asymmetry" to be an element of the universes origins, with concepts like "Uncertainty", the "Higg's mechanism", among others.

The ancient egyptians theorized that the creation of our universe could only result from the destruction of a previous universe - thus, this eternal recurrence causes all possibilities to be juxtaposed within an entity the Egyptians of Ancient Hermopolis called "Nun" (represented as a goddess, depicting her as a "watery abyss" with the element of water symbolizing the containment of "all possibility", a metaphor which was also used by the early Greek scientist/alchemist Thales). This almost precisely parallels "M-theory" in modern physics, as well as other theories in modern physics which incorporate concepts such as a "10th dimensional point of singularity".

Do you find it convincing yet that our modern theoretical science is just another repeat in a long series of repeats - just another Egyptian Ogdoad? The paradigm regarding our universe's physical origins is perhaps the most elusive and resilient to change over time - possibly because we had correctly interpreted it thousands of years ago, and the words used to represent it merely change to accommodate for the current era's technological capacity.

The outline of theoretical physics has long been already painted - we now merely have the technology to discover the underlying formulas so we can give theoretical physics a practical application. Fusion reactors, cancer therapy, and potentially the possibility of inter-stellar space travel are some of these "practical applications" our application of technology to theoretical physics will give us.

We have been building up like an ant-hive, with no real idea of what we've been building up to or why, but going forward none-the-less due to the lack of an alternative. We are just building up to the next step, whatever it might be, the next major shift in our species' paradigm. The core essential concepts (such as metaphysics) stay the same in the human psyche throughout the generations, stored within our collective unconscious - our DNA, being withdrawn and utilized as tools when they are needed. We are eternal (one way or another no matter what belief system you hold, they all show that human life is inherent in the structure of existence itself), with this world and our memories of it just being temporary play-time in a sandbox.
 
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^ Great post! I remember when I started studying physics in the university years ago and at the time I was reading Thomas Kuhn's book "The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions", that explains how the current "paradigm" in a way defines what is real to us...

When you go backward in time, the boundaries of science and philosophy get less clear, like you said, but I think that the point when Isaac Newton invented differential calculus was the critical step that allowed people to study natural phenomena mathematically and experimentally, instead of using pure reasoning(in the spirit of ancient Greeks). That was probably the beginning of "hard" science.
 
What's also interesting as well as confusing is the correlation between industrialization and advancement in scientific understanding. Certainy, Newton couldn't have formulated calculus if he did not have writing utensils, paper, and plenty of free time set aside from hard labor - all of which had to be provided by industrialization.

So does scientific advancement lead to industrialization, or vice versa? Intuition would tell us that the former is more prevalent (certainly, both are true to an extent), but I would hope to present a valid argument that industrialization is the more vital component; for without industrialization, commerce, socialistic principles integrated into government, there would be no means for turning scientific advancement into technological advancement. Inventing an efficient form of calculus would be futile without universities for it to be taught at; the innovation of the printing press would be useless if there were no roads provided for documents to be transported on.

The best example would be the modern computer -- think of the wide variety of raw resources required to make a single personal computer! If you were sent out into the bush and given your entire life to make a computer whilst having no man made tools provided to you, would it even be possible? Think of all the raw resources you'd have to harvest and the equipment you'd have to make. It would be like 3 inch tall man trying to build a house of cards.

I would conclude that all the scientific knowledge in the world would be useless without an industrialized civilization, and therefore scientific advancement is the dependent variable of the equation.

Since initially, industrialization only requires time and a human population to grow, and the scientific knowledge needed for these initial steps is provided by homo sapien's instinctive knowledge of crude tools.


There are ancient accounts of calculus being performed, but no method had been laid down at that point and been considered "calculus". Therefore, perhaps our modern method of calculus might have been able to be introduced in ancient times, if only the ancient mathematicians had the resources for propagating such knowledge.

Edit: sorry if there is any grammatical or rhetorical errors in my posts; using a forum interface on a iPhone is extremely difficult, frustrating, and tedious
 
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the interpretation of quantum theory is a sub-subject of metaphysics. i.e. are things really just fuzzy, as the copenhagen interpretation says, or are there many worlds, as the everettian interpretation says. these are questions of metaphysics. both interpretations give the same predictions, and those predictions form quantum theory proper.

also- one is formulated in the language of mathematics, one in natural language. different tools for different jobs. metaphysics isn't interested in predicting things to 15 decimal places, quantum theory must (well not to 15 dp, but it has been tested to that accuracy, unlike any other branch of physics) to stay in the cannon of 'science.'
 
SpunkySkunk347 said:
Metaphysics was more prevalent in before the 20th century - an explanation as to why philosophers were attempting to solve such problems and not scientists is because there was no equipment back then for testing the hypotheses of such subjects.
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This is not true, traditional metaphysicians denied the claim to empirically derived observation as metaphysically meaningful, regardless of how advanced science could become, science is always empirical and never more than.
 
Nagelfar said:
This is not true, traditional metaphysicians denied the claim to empirically derived observation as metaphysically meaningful, regardless of how advanced science could become, science is always empirical and never more than.
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I go into that too. But you have to see my point: subjects such as "the origin of the universe" have forever been in the hands of metaphysicians, since the subject couldn't be approached by anyone else. But now that the equipment is becoming available for experimentation, such topics are now handed over to empirical science - and metaphysicians have been replaced.
 
SpunkySkunk347 said:
I go into that too. But you have to see my point: subjects such as "the origin of the universe" have forever been in the hands of metaphysicians, since the subject couldn't be approached by anyone else. But now that the equipment is becoming available for experimentation, such topics are now handed over to empirical science - and metaphysicians have been replaced.
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I suppose become marginalized and niche, but not replaced because metaphysics never attempted to fill that role. Maybe only those who tried to fill that role with metaphysics have turned to empirical means, but not the other way about.
 
Nagelfar said:
I suppose become marginalized and niche, but not replaced because metaphysics never attempted to fill that role. Maybe only those who tried to fill that role with metaphysics have turned to empirical means, but not the other way about.
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If I were typing this from a desktop computer and not from an iPhone, I'd go find a ton of references for you of Greek philosophers and their metaphysics regarding the origin of the universe
 
Nagelfar said:
... science is always empirical and never more than.
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And what else, exactly, would there be in addition to the empirically provable? Please provide references to physical evidence.
 
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