Reality Without Realism

Arkady Plotnitsky is a distinguished professor at Purdue University, where he teaches in the Literature, Theory and Cultural Studies Program and the Philosophy and Literature Program. He received his M.S. in Mathematics from Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) State University, and his PhD in Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to Purdue, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University. He has been awarded fellowships at Duke, Utah, Vanderbilt and Oregon State Universities, and was twice a short-term visitor at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. His extensive publications on the philosophy of physics and Modernism, and on the relationships among literature, philosophy, and science, include eight books, two hundred articles and, as editor/coeditor, eight volumes of essays and journal issues. He has given about one hundred invited plenary lectures and presented over three hundred papers at international conferences. His most recent book is The Principles of Quantum Theory, from Planck’s Quantum to the Higgs Boson: The Nature of Quantum Reality and the Spirit of Copenhagen (Springer, 2016).

• 1 Fundamentals of the RWR View.- 2 Bohr’s Breakthrough: Quantum Jumps, Quantum States and Transitions without Connections.- 3 “The Heisenberg Method”: Algebra, Geometry, and Probability in Quantum Mechanics.-  4 Schrödinger’s Great Guess: The Time-Dependent Wave Equation.- 5 Niels Bohr and the Character of Physical Law: “A Radical Revision of Our Attitude Toward the Problem of Physical Reality”.- 6 “Without in Any Way Disturbing the System”: Reality, Probability, and Nonlocality, from Bohr to Bell and Beyond.- 7 “Something Happened”: The Real and the Virtual in Elementary Particle Physics.- 8 From Circuits to Categories in Quantum Information Theory.