Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 44 (2013) 2021

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Studies in History and Philosophy

of Modern Physics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsb

Part and whole in physics: An introduction

Richard Healey a,n, Jos Ufnk b
a
b

Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona, 213 Social Sciences, Tucson, AZ 85721-0027, USA
Department of Philosophy, University of Minnesota, 217 19th Avenue S. #831, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 9 November 2011
Accepted 16 November 2011
Available online 9 February 2012

When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics
Natural philosophy began in ancient Ionia as thinkers such as
Thales, Anaxagoras and Democritus set out to establish the
composition of the world using reason and observation. Although
the title Newton chose for his major work located it rmly in that
tradition, the technical content of the Principia already made it
largely unintelligible to the (medically trained) philosopher
Locke. Propelled by the enormous growth of knowledge during
and after what the historian Stephen Brush called the second
scientic revolution (which he dated 18001950), physics and
philosophy have each become increasingly professionalized and
specialized, as readers of this journal are well aware.
Contemporary philosophers are developing accounts of what it
takes for items including physical objects, events or properties to
constitute parts of wholes, while contemporary physicists are
developing successful theories that help us understand a variety
of forms of matter (familiar as well as exotic) in terms of many
novel, and often technical, composition relations.
Their focus on the most general categories of being has tempted
some metaphysicians to seek understanding of the partwhole
relation through formal systems, importantly including what
Simons (1987) calls classical mereology. Lewis (1991) gave a clear
formulation of classical mereology and defended it as perfectly
understood, unproblematic and certain. But Simons and others
(notably Van Inwagen, 1990) continue to question its authority over
the partwhole relation even in its most familiar applications.
Mellor (2006) argues that very different partwhole relations obtain
between different kinds of entities, and that while these relations
share most of their formal properties, they need not share all of

Corresponding author.
E-mail address: rhealey@email.arizona.edu (R. Healey).

1355-2198/$ - see front matter & 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.shpsb.2011.11.004

them. But many philosophers still expect physics to pursue if not

realize the ancient Democritean vision of a physical world composed
of ultimate parts (be they elementary particles, elds, strings, space
time points or whatever) as (classical) mereological atoms.
But it remains unclear whether fundamental physics can
presently supply such ultimate building blocks and whether it
even aspires to do so. The ontology of the quantum eld theories
of the Standard Model remains obscure even with experimentalists hot on the trail of the Higgs boson (see Fraser, 2008; Baker,
2009). Other candidates for a fundamental theory beyond the
Standard Model (such as string theory, loop quantum gravity and
others), which aim to unify gravity with other fundamental forces
are still in the process of being developed and it seems too early
to judge their ontological credentials.
In any case, there is much more in contemporary physics to
attract the attention of anyone interested in physical composition
than such supposedly fundamental theories. When trying to
understand the behavior of some system, physicists commonly
deploy several theories or models simultaneously, each representing it differently. A condensed matter physicist may begin by
characterizing a system, such as a uid or a magnet, as composed
solely of electrons, nuclei and light. But in order to understand its
behavior, it is found fruitful to think of it as being composed of
quasi-particles of various kinds that are neither identical to nor
composed of these. When bridging the gap between microscopic
theories of the constituents of a uid or magnet and theories of its
macroscopic behavior, it may be necessary to re-model its
constituents and their interactions again and again at increasing
length scales in order to understand how the macroscopic
behavior emerges from the microscopic. Moreover, these intermediate representations are so abstracted as not to distinguish
between uid and magnet.

R. Healey, J. Ufnk / Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 44 (2013) 2021

Quantum entanglement and superposition raise further questions concerning physical composition. If the quantum state completely describes a system but never collapses then it seems likely
that the only system with denite physical properties is the entire
universea dramatic failure of the properties of the whole to be
determined by those of its parts! Moreover the radical indistinguishability of quantum particles often associated with the (anti)symmetrization of the quantum state of a set of (fermions) bosons
of the same species threatens to undermine their claim to exist as
individual parts of the fusion of that set into a whole.
We organized a Lorentz Workshop on Part and Whole in
Physics in March 2010 to foster fruitful interdisciplinary dialog
among a diverse group of philosophers and physicists, all with
interests in partwhole relations in the physical world. The talks
and exchanges were cordial as well as intellectually stimulating,
exhibiting a rich variety of approaches to the conference themes.
But it may be a symptom of the difculty in reestablishing links
between what have become methodologically and sociologically
divergent sub-disciplines that the harvest of papers from the
workshop in this focus issue is so meager. We hope that it
contains seeds from which a richer and more fruitful cooperation
may grow.
Here is a brief introduction to the three papers that follow:
Leo Kadanoff, a pre-eminent contributor to the physics of
renormalization, presents a historical and conceptual review of the
elds to which it has been applied. As he explains, the renormalization (semi)group provides a systematic set of techniques for relating
theories and models that apply to a physical system at different
length scales. It thereby enables us to understand how the behavior
of the whole depends on that of its parts. But what is striking is how
unimportant the physical nature of part and whole turns out to be:
phase transitions in systems as different as magnets, superuids,
two-dimensional ordinary uids and a plasma of charged particles
fall into the same universality class under the renormalization
group.
GianCarlo Ghirardi is well known as one of the authors of the socalled GRW theory of wave-packet collapsean inuential attempt
to show how quantum measurements can have outcomes and to

21

account for the emergence of a classical realm, even though a wavefunction completely describes a quantum system. In his contribution, he rst explains how this GRW theory helps to locate nonidentical systems as parts of an otherwise unbroken whole, given a
massdensity ontology. Then he proposes a striking revision in the
standard view of entanglement for identical particles to allow one
consistently to consider these, also, as parts of a whole even in cases
when that whole is represented by a quantum state that is not
expressible as a product of their individual states.
The physical world has often been depicted as a compositional
hierarchy, with organisms composed of cells, composed of molecules, composed of atoms, y , composed of quarks and leptons, y
This picture has fueled reductionist ambitions of understanding
objects at each level of the hierarchy in terms of objects at lower
levels, as well as encouraging speculation as to whether the
hierarchy has an ultimate grounding. In his contribution, Richard
Healey exhibits features of contemporary physics that demonstrate
the inadequacy of the hierarchical picture. Our best fundamental
theories do not describe any clear candidates for ultimate building
blocks of such a hierarchy in the form of elementary particles, elds
or strings. Superposition functions as an important composition
relation in classical as well as quantum theories that fails to conform
to principles of classical mereology, while the systemsubsystem
relation deviates in different ways. Condensed matter physics
introduces its own novel ontologies that do not t anywhere in
the common hierarchical picture of the structure of matter.

References
Baker, D. J. (2009). Against eld interpretations of quantum eld theory. British
Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 60, 585609.
Fraser, D. (2008). The fate of particles in quantum eld theories with interactions.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 39, 841859.
Lewis, D. K. (1991). Parts of classes. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mellor, D. H. (2006). Wholes and parts: The limits of composition. South African
Journal of Philosophy, 25, 138145.
Simons, P. (1987). Parts: A study in ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Inwagen, P. (1990). Material beings. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.