Michael Epperson

The very fact that the totality of our sense experiences is such that by means of thinking (operations with concepts, and the creation and use of definite functional relations between them, and the coordination of sense experiences to these concepts) it can be put in order, this fact is one which leaves us in awe. One may say, " The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility. " The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle. ~ Albert Einstein, " Physics and Reality, " 1936 1 After nearly a century of attempted integration, the deep and enduring incompatibility of quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity is today increasingly portrayed as a crisis in physics. What was once characterized as a stubbornly persistent technical problem now signifies, for many physicists, a crisis of incomprehensibility. Without a formal means of quantum mechanically depicting local-global relations in an extensive continuum, our earned confidence in physics' ability to provide a coherent, unified description of nature has, for the growing number of physicists calling attention to this crisis, begun to falter. To make matters worse, both quantum mechanics and general relativity have their own individual crises of incomprehensibility which add even deeper levels of complication in any attempted integration. The problems of dark matter and dark energy are infamously emblematic of observational inconsistencies with general relativity, so much so that for many cosmologists, dark matter and energy in recent decades have been costumed and recast as conventional features of modern physics. Likewise, in quantum mechanics, there is perhaps no more obvious manifestation of a crisis of incomprehensibility—in this case, one that inspires the total abandonment of the idea of a coherent, unified understanding of nature—than the Many Worlds Interpretation 2 (MWI) where, for any given quantum measurement, every potential

Through both a historical and philosophical analysis of the concept of possibility, we show how including both potentiality and actuality as part of the real is both compatible with experience and contributes to solving key problems of fundamental process and emergence. The book is organized into four main sections that incorporate our routes to potentiality: (1) potentiality in modern science [history and philosophy; quantum physics and complexity]; (2) Relational Realism [ontological interpretation of quantum physics; philosophy and logic]; (3) Process Physics [ontological interpretation of relativity theory; physics and philosophy]; (4) on speculative philosophy and physics [limitations and approximations; process philosophy]. We conclude that certain fundamental problems in modern physics require complementary analyses of certain philosophical and metaphysical issues, and that such scholarship reveals intrinsic features and limits of determinism, potentiality, and emergence that enable, among others, important progress on the quantum theory of measurement problem and new understandings of emergence.