THE PRINCIPLE OF SUPERPOSITION. The need for a quantum theory Classical mechanics has been developed continuously from the time of Newton and applied to an ...

The philosophical theory of scientific explanation proposed here involves a radically new treatment of causality that accords with the pervasively statistical character of contemporary science. Wesley C. Salmon describes three fundamental conceptions of scientific explanation--the epistemic, modal, and ontic. He argues that the prevailing view is untenable and that the modal conception is scientifically out-dated. Significantly revising aspects of his earlier work, he defends a causal/mechanical theory that is a version of the ontic conception. Professor Salmon's theory furnishes a robust (...) argument for scientific realism akin to the argument that convinced twentieth-century physical scientists of the existence of atoms and molecules. To do justice to such notions as irreducibly statistical laws and statistical explanation, he offers a novel account of physical randomness. The transition from the "reviewed view" of scientific explanation to the causal/mechanical model requires fundamental rethinking of basic explanatory concepts. (shrink)

I am grateful to Peter Achinstein, Don Howard, and the other participants at the conference, 'The Role of Experiments in Scientific Changer', Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 30 March to 1 April, 1990, for helpful discussion, and especially to Ron Laymon for his discussion comments presented at the conference on an earlier version of this paper.

The old quantum theory of black body radiation was manifestly logically inconsistent. It required the energies of electric resonators to be both quantized and continuous. To show that this manifest inconsistency was inessential to the theory's recovery of the Planck distribution law, I extract a subtheory free of this manifest inconsistency but from which Planck's law still follows.

(1980). The development of attitudes to the wave-particle duality of light and quantum theory, 1900–1920. Annals of Science: Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 59-79.