Does Aristotle inspire late-20th or 21st century physicists?

Question

Is there anything a late-20th or 21st century physicist can learn from antique philosophy of nature as stated by Aristotle? Is there any new inspiring notion or thought?

Note. I do not ask about the past; e.g. discriminating between actual and potential once was an inspiring idea. Also I do not ask about late-20th or 21st century philosophy of nature, but about late-20th or 21st century physics.

Answer 1

Carlo Rovelli wrote a defence of Aristotle's physics which deserves to be read: http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4057 An idea which is perhaps worth reconsidering is formulated found in De Caelo (305a26): what does not move is merely mathematical and does not exist. Contemporary physics has became almost entirely mathematical and tends to obliterate the divide between mathematics and physics. The 19th c. conceded that absence of obvious contradiction is enough to legitimate a mathematical inquiry; for physics some evidence was mandatory. Today physicists tend to promote purely mathematical constructs as physics - they are cheap and mostly unfalsifiable. But they are offered only on the strength on non-contradiction. Indeed there is an attempt to reverse philosophical perspective by inverting the role of modality and existence - physics pretends to a god's like view in which the actual world is merely one among the possible ones. Possibility is a modality which, as Aristotle knew, escapes the non-contradictoriness manifested by reality.

Answer 2

Does Aristotle inspire contemporary physicists?

No. Newton does. So does Maxwell. And Einstein. But not Aristotle. Au contraire, his work is generally thought to have become doctrinal and held up scientific progress for centuries. Or millennia.

Is there anything a contemporary physicist can learn from antique philosophy of nature as stated by Aristotle?

Yes. See the five elements section of the Wikipedia Aristotle article. The fifth element is aether, aka quintessence. This has a modern version, see quintessence (physics), but set that aside for now. Instead check out this, where Robert B Laughlin says this:

"It is ironic that Einstein's most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed... The word 'ether' has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum..."

See Einstein describing space as an aether here. And Maxwell here, and Newton here. Space isn't nothing. That's why there's a shear stress term in the stress-energy-momentum tensor:

_{CCO image by Maschen, based on image created by Bamse, see Wikipedia}

The stress-energy-momentum tensor "describes the density and flux of energy and momentum in spacetime". Because space isn't nothing. Space is a gin-clear ghostly elastic continuum. Google on Einstein elastic and search the arXiv.

Is there any new inspiring notion or thought?

If it's new to you, then maybe.

Answer 3

Pierre Duhem (1861-1916) wrote:

Little by little…mechanical hypotheses came up against obstacles on all sides which were more and more numerous and difficult to surmount. The atomic, Cartesian, and Newtonian systems gradually lost favour with physicists and made way for methods analogous to those advocated by Aristotle. Present-day physics is tending to return to a peripatetic form.

^{Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem, Mixture and Chemical Combination: And Related Essays, trans. Paul Needham (Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 119. Originally published as: Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem, Le mixte et la combinaison chimique: essai sur l’évolution d’une idée (Paris: C. Naud, 1902), 200: “Peu à peu…les hypothèses mécanistes se heurtent de toutes parts à des obstacles de plus en plus nombreux, de plus en plus difficiles à surmonter. Alors la faveur des physiciens se détache des systèmes atomistiques, cartésiens ou newtoniens pour revenir à des méthodes analogues à celles que prônait Aristote. La Physique actuelle tend à reprendre une forme péripatéticienne.”}

(cf. this)

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Duhem's "prophecy" came true in Heisenberg, who was influenced by Aristotle. Heisenberg states in his Physics and Philosophy that the probability wave concept in quantum mechanics (p. 41)

was a quantitative version of the concept of 'potentia' in Aristotelian philosophy

and that the (p. 80)

concept of the soul for instance in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas was more natural and less forced than the Cartesian concept of 'res cogitans,' even if we are convinced that the laws of physics and chemistry are strictly valid in living organisms.

^{cf.
Smith, Wolfgang. The Quantum Enigma: Finding the Hidden Key. Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2005.
and the resources here}

Answer 4

In the way that you've phrased the question the answer would have to be no - but that appears to be what you want and that's what's meant by a leading question, so chosen to ignore all evidence to the contrary - which given the subject at hand would be historical, and foundational.

After all Aristotle was writing two Millenia ago; and two thousand years is some time for his ideas to be incorporated into the philosophical fabric in many different ways; after all we are not so far away from Newton or Maxwell, but the language of both are now sufficiently different that a well-educated physicist will have severe difficulties reading their work - yet we have no problem at all stating that now their work is influential, and still influential - Newton on space and time, and Maxwell on the notion of a field.

And this takes us to a position that Gadamer posited, which is that there has been a loss of properly historical consciousness, we might say a kind of 'rootlessness' in knowledge.

Still, in the terms of your circumscribed circumspection, and exclusionary practise - I mean the extremely narrow remit of the question, but taking into account comments by Rovelli, and Maudlin at face-value when they say Aristotles reflections on space, time and the continuum were profound - the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Math & Logic, in III.2 Aristotle and the intuitionistic continuum relates that:

From Aristotle onwards, mathematicians and philosophers have found this viscosity - this topological unspittability is inconsistent with the view that the continuum is made up of independent points - atoms ... This is a central part of Aristotles Physics and Metaphysics.

Kant endorses this alleged inconsistency, as well as Brouwer - in his early work.

To be sure Cantor, Dedekind and others succeeded in creating such a continuum, but Brouwer pushed all this aside.

Now, one avatar of intuitinionistic mathematics is Topos Theory; and there have been some work by physicists on this - here are a few titles:

Heunon & Spitters: a topos for algebraic quantum mechanics

Isham & Doering: A topos foundation for theories of physics

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You might also find the essay by Karin Verelst & Bob Coecke in the inter-disciplinary book Metadebates on Science: Einstein meets Magritte worth looking into, its titled Early Greek Thought and Perspectives for the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Preliminaries for an Ontological Approach; it's also available on the arxiv; it begins by:

At the origin of our approach lay two encounters between Greek thought and Quantum Mechanics ... the first encounter has been presented in a short lecture byC.Piron in which he attempted to develop a realistic QM-interpretation based on two concepts fundamental to Aristotelian metaphysics, viz. potentiality and actuality. The second one is the doctoral dissertation of D.Aerts . It both by content and title dealt with the problem of the One and the Many, the central theme Plato inherited from the fifth century philosopher Parmenides of Elea ... the thought instruments developed by Plato and Aristotle ... are in use up to the present, be it in slightly modified forms ... our position will be that this classical contradiction has slipped through the ages unimpaired, but in different forms such as to make it hardly recognisable in our present epistemological and ontological concepts, both in philosophy and science. A revelation of this implicit presence by reconstructing the outlines of its historical pathway then becomes the necessary first step towards an approach for the tackling of problems it eventually causes in todays science. The argument will lead us to the conclusion that the paradoxes appearing in QM represent such a problem ...

...This is so because Being, over a lapse of time, has no stability. Everything that it is at this moment changes at the same time, there it is not. This coming togther of Being & Not-Being at one instant is known as the principle of coincidence of opposites. It is crucial to see that this principle is connected to the possibility of motion, for being in motion implies to and not to be at the same time at a certain time, at a certain place. It further implies the unity of the world in the sense that there are no separated objects, its ontology is dynamic.

• the bolded text is not my emphasis, but was emphasised as such in the original.