Peter Lewis (philosopher)

Peter Lewis is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy specializing in quantum mechanics) at the University of Miami, Florida. [ [http://www.as.miami.edu/phi/lewis/index.htm University website listing. retrieved Nov 21, 2006] ] He received his B.A. in physics (1988) from Oxford University, and his M.A. (1992) and Ph.D. (1996) in philosophy from the University of California, Irvine. Prior to arriving at Miami in August 2000, he was Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas Tech University (1996-2000) and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong (1998-2000).

He is married to fellow University of Miami Associate Professor of Philosophy Amie Thomasson.

Philosophic work

Peter Lewis is best known for his arguments in "Quantum Mechanics, Orthogonality and Counting" against the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber theory (GRW) of quantum mechanics. Lewis argues that due to GRW's relaxing of the requirement that mutually exclusive states of affairs must be represented by orthogonal vectors (the standard orthonormal rule, or SOR) arithmetic will fail to apply to ordinary macroscopic objects. Lewis replies to his critics on this paper in “Counting Marbles: Reply to Critics”.

Lewis has also defended the GRW theory and Bohm’s theory against Many-worlds theorists like David Deutsch in their claims that said theories are simply “many world theories in denial”. Deutsch's attack plays on the fact that neither the GRW nor Bohm's theory contains a collapse of the wavefunction. For example, in the wavefunction where a cat in a box is both alive and dead, once we look and find the cat dead, for Bohm's theory the portion of the wavefunction where the cat is alive continues to exist but becomes empty, while in GRW the portion of the wavefunction where the cat is alive simply drops to a low amplitude. Many-world theorists, who want to say there is a world where the cat is alive and another world where the cat is dead, object that since both Bohm and GRW continue to have both an alive and dead cat in their wavefunctions, they are effectively accepting a many-world theory. Lewis defends both GRW and Bohm's theory against this attack, while himself not accepting either theory.

Lastly, Peter Lewis has shown formal inconsistencies in the conspiracy interpretation of quantum mechanics. While such interpretations are universally rejected, such a formal debilitating blow had yet to be stuck against them. Conspiracy interpretations of quantum mechanics exploit a loophole in tests of Bell's theorem; while it is normally interpreted as ruling out hidden-variable theories, it is possible to do so providing one is willing to countenance pre-measurement correlations between the properties of measured systems and measuring devices.

Primary works

*"Interpreting Spontaneous Collapse Theories", Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics.
*"Life in Configuration Space", British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
*"Quantum Mechanics and Ordinary Language: The Fuzzy Link", Philosophy of Science 70: 1437-1446, 2003.
*"Four Strategies for Dealing with the Counting Anomaly in Spontaneous Collapse Theories of Quantum Mechanics", International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 17: 137-142, 2003.
*"Counting Marbles: Reply to Critics", British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54: 165-170, 2003.
*"Why the Pessimistic Induction is a Fallacy", Synthese 129: 371-380, 2001.
*"What is it like to be Schrödinger’s cat?", Analysis 60.1: 22-29, 2000.
*"Quantum Mechanics, Orthogonality and Counting", British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48: 313-328, 1997.
*"GRW and the Tails Problem", Topoi 14: 23-33, 1995
*"Quantum Mechanics and Ontological Commitment", Kriterion 5: 3-6, 1993

References