I looked into this, and as I was just going through sympy.physics.mechanics, I thought of how the name Newton is associated with the kind of Physics that we call Mechanics. I remembered your post about Schopenhauer's hesitance to go along with Newton's theories, and I thought maybe there is a connection with Quantum Physics.
So I did a quick search and download a 20 page paper from Academia.
I will try to attach it to this message.
What contemporary quantum physics seems to be telling us is that deep down, way below the microscopic level, the world is not a world of spatially and temporally located particles of matter – it is not the world of phenomena. “Particleness” itself is a subjective imposition that enters the picture only when an “observer” enters. Unobserved – or as Schopenhauer would put it “un-represented to our perceiving instrument,” or “outside the world as representation,” or “in the world as Will,” – true reality, at its deepest level, consists of “possibilities, tendencies, and urges.”
It seems that even for the quantum physicists it is difficult to avoid anthropomorphisms like the word “urges”. The quantum physicists may indeed be telling us that the world, at that level of deep reality, is “Will” (and its dehumanized, inanimate correspondent), and that what we take to be the attributes of “matter” are really subjective impositions, i.e., events that occur in the acts of observing and perceiving – or events that our perceiving instrument represents to us. It seems difficult to conclude otherwise – or so one might imagine Schopenhauer arguing.
The file did not attach itself. I will send via email.
I will also read it in full before commenting again.
It's called "Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics and Contemporary Quantum Theory"
Notes:
It is in the implications of the theory of quantum physics that Schopenhauer’s metaphysics find their closest analogue.
Schopenhauer’s influence on later artists, writers, philosophers, psychologists – thinkers in general – is well known. One need only mention a few, like Wagner, Turgenev, Zola, Proust, Hardy, Conrad, Melville, Mann, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Jung. Less well known, however, is the fact that, in the world of the hard science of physics, several of the originators and developers of quantum theory had studied and found much to admire in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Moreover, it is not simply that many of the quantum physicists, like Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, and others, studied Schopenhauer and appreciated his philosophy. The connection between Schopenhauer and these great physicists goes beyond mere study and appreciation. Schopenhauer may have influenced the thinking of at least some of them. And beyond the notion that the writings of Schopenhauer may have influenced the thought of some of the great quantum physicists, there is, influence or no, a remarkable consonance between the tenets of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and the tenets of contemporary quantum theory.
Pauli’s biographical data demonstrate his rich familiarity with Schopenhauer’s philosophy. In a letter to his colleague Victor Weisskopf, written in 1954, some time after his major contributions to quantum theory, Pauli described his (Pauli’s) own philosophical orientation: “My own philosophical background,” wrote Pauli, “is a mixture of Schopenhauer (minus the determinism of his times), Lao Tse, and Niels Bohr.” In another letter, this time written to the analytical psychologist Carl Jung, Pauli wrote: “As you well know, in regard to religion and philosophy, I come from Lao-Tse and Arthur Schopenhauer.” Pauli expanded on those terse statements in another letter to the philosopher H. L. Goldschmidt:
"The East as a whole has made a strong impression on me [wrote Pauli], China even more than India, both the ideas of the I-Ching (Yin-Yang polarity) and also Lao Tse. Schopenhauer’s attempt to bring Kant and Buddhism under one umbrella I found very interesting, but, owing to Kant’s recalcitrance and Buddha’s passivity in the face of the world, not successful."
Schopenhauer’s dual world is a strange one indeed – every bit as strange as the dual world of the quantum theorists. At the ordinary level – the phenomenal level, i.e., the level at which we normally perceive things – we experience things and events as discrete and concrete “realities”. But at that other level, the level of true reality, the level of thing-in-itself – the noumenal level – it is quite a different situation. At that deep level, which we can experience only dimly and inferentially, all is “will”, a chaos of tendency – tendency to exist, to occur, to live, to interconnect, and to survive.
The point is that contemporary quantum physicists also posit a dual reality. At the ordinary level – the level at which we live and work – we experience things and events as discrete and concrete “realities”, realities that are quite adequately explained in terms of Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry. But at that other level, the level of true reality, the submicroscopic level of “thing-in-itself” as understood by the quantum physicists, all is … what? Waves? Waves of what? Waves of probability, of tendency. Reality at the quantum or thing-in-itself level seems to be a chaos of tendency – tendency to exist, to occur, to live, to interconnect, and to survive – patterns of probabilities – searching for a word that isn’t there. Schopenhauer chose the word “will”.
“The fundamental tenet of the Vedanta school consisted not in denying the existence of matter, that is, of solidity, impenetrability, and extended figure (to deny which would be lunacy), but in correcting the popular notion of it, and in contending that it has no essence independent of mental perception; that existence and perceptibility are convertible terms.” These words [wrote Schopenhauer] adequately express the compatibility of empirical reality with transcendental ideality.