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  1. Pure Process Realism: The Unification of Realism and Empiricism.Willian Penn - 2024 - Manuscrito 47 (1):2023-0051.
    I describe the key features of pure process realism-realism about the processes that are identified by experimental dynamics structured by scientific models-showing that the view meets criteria for scientific realism. I argue that process realism resolves many of the worries of the antirealist, including the problems of idealization, underdetermination, contextuality, multiplicity, and the pessimistic meta-induction. I show this resolution in the context of a contentious model from physics: the Bohr model of the atom. I then generalize from this discussion to (...)
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  • Real Virtuality and Actual Transitions: Historical Reflections on Virtual Entities before Quantum Field Theory.Alexander S. Blum & Martin Jähnert - 2024 - Perspectives on Science 32 (3):329-349.
    This paper studies the notion of virtuality in the Bohr-Kramers-Slater theory of 1924. We situate the virtual entities of BKS within the tradition of the correspondence principle and the radiation theory of the Bohr model. We show how, in this context, virtual oscillators emerged as classical substitute radiators and were used to describe the otherwise elusive quantum transitions. They played an effective role in the quantum theory of radiation while remaining categorically distinct and ontologically separated from the quantum world of (...)
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  • Virtuality in Modern Physics in the 1920s and 1930s: Meaning(s) of an Emerging Notion.Jean-Philippe Martinez - 2024 - Perspectives on Science 32 (3):350-371.
    This article discusses the meaning of the notion of virtuality in modern physics. To this end, it develops considerations on the introduction and establishment in nuclear physics of two independent concepts at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s: that of the virtual state, used in the context of neutron scattering studies, and that of the virtual transition, useful for the theoretical understanding of strong nuclear forces, which forms the basis of what are now called virtual particles. Their comparative analysis (...)
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  • Quantum mechanics, radiation, and the equivalence proof.Alexander Blum & Martin Jähnert - 2024 - Archive for History of Exact Sciences 78 (5):567-616.
    This paper re-evaluates the formative year of quantum mechanics—from Heisenberg’s first paper on matrix mechanics to Schrödinger’s equivalence proof—by focusing on the role of radiation in the emerging theory. We argue that the radiation problem played a key role in early quantum mechanics, a role that has not been taken into account in the standard histories. Radiation was perceived by the main protagonists of matrix and wave mechanics as a central lacuna in these emerging theories and continued to contribute to (...)
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