Matters are not so clear on the physical side

OLIMPIA LOMBARDI; MARIO CASTAGNINO

Coburg. Alemania

Congreso; 2008 ISPC Summer Symposium; 2008

International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry (ISPC)

According to chemical reductionism, chemical entities, when analyzed in depth, are no more than physical entities: orbitals do not exist because ‘orbital’ is a non-referring term in quantum mechanics; molecular shape is only a powerful and illuminating metaphor because shape does not inhabit the quantum world.  In other words, molecular chemistry refers, at last, to the quantum ontology and, therefore, the trust in the ontological commitments of chemistry turns out to be finally grounded on quantum mechanics.  One of the main problems of this position is that nobody really knows what quantum ontology is. The purpose of this work is twofold.  First, we will show that this trust does not take into account the problems of the ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics: in the discussions about the relationship between chemistry and physics, difficulties are seen only on the side of chemistry, whereas matters highly controversial on the side of physics are taken for granted.  For instance, it is usually supposed that the infinite mass limit in the Born-Oppenheimer approximation leads by itself to the concept of molecular shape; however, it is not noticed that such a step is implicitly based on an interpretative assumption which, in turn, runs into difficulties when applied to explain the simplest model of the hydrogen atom. Our second purpose is to present the main elements of a new interpretation of quantum mechanics, which relies on the physical content of the theory, by contrast with the recent work in the field based on the analysis of its formal structure.  When applied to atomic models, this interpretation solves the difficulties arising from other interpretative views and, for this reason, it can contribute to the understanding of the relationships between molecular chemistry and quantum mechanics.