Quanta Mechanics

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"If there are ways of describing the world, even if they're just approximate at some higher level of abstraction, they should still count as real," he says. "So i'm happy with e kind of middle level description of objects ... They're jumping around, you know, or they're shifting, or they’re a wave pattern." He continues: "I think that's fine. Well, except, except that,you know, now you're, i can't let it go, because you're bumping right up against my research in quanta mechanics".

Are numbers real? What does that even mean? You can’t kick a number. But you can talk about numbers in useful ways, and we use numbers to talk about the real world. There’s surely a kind of reality there. On the other hand, Luke Skywalker isn’t a real person, but we talk about him all the time. Maybe we can talk about unreal things in useful ways. Jody Azzouni is one of the leading contemporary advocates of nominalism, the view that abstract objects are not “things,” they are merely labels we use in talking about things. A deeply philosophical issue, but one that has implications for how we think about physics and the laws of nature.

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Jody Azzouni received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the City University of New York. He is currently a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. In addition to his philosophical work, he is an active writer of fiction and poetry.

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