The Bootstrap Principle and the Uniqueness of the World

Abstract

The bootstrap hypothesis emerged first as a possible explanation of certain experimental data in particle physics. This hypothesis was formulated for the first time in 1959 by Geoffrey Chew (1959; Chew & Jacob, 1964), a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and was immediately used, for detailed physics calculations, by Chew and Mandelstam (1961). The word bootstrap itself is untranslatable. Indeed, bootstrap, in the proper sense laces, also means to levitate while dragging your boots. The most appropriate term in translation would be that of self-consistency. The bootstrap theory has emerged as a natural reaction against classical realism, which received a death blow, and against the idea, to which it was associated, of a need for equations of motion in space-time, during the formulation of quantum mechanics, around 1930. According to Newton, we learned about the existence of equations of motion, in order to describe physical reality: Newton’s equation regarding macroscopic bodies, Maxwell’s equations for electric and magnetic fields, and Schrödinger and Dirac’s equations for the movements of atomic systems. The movement described by these equations is that of certain entities considered as fundamental building blocks of physical reality, defined at each point of the space-time continuum. By definition, these equations possess an intrinsic deterministic character (the fact that, in some cases, large ensembles of objects can lead to a chaotic behavior does not alter the deterministic character of the basic equations of motion). Quantum entities are not subject to classical determinism. The bootstrap theory is just drawing the logical conclusions of this situation by proposing the abdication of any equation of motion. This attitude is consistent with the schedule of the matrix S (S is the initial for the English word scattering) initiated by Heisenberg in 1943: A realist theory must be expressed in terms of quantities directly related to experimental observation (Cushing, 1990). The abdication of any equation of motion has an immediate consequence: the absence of any fundamental brick of physical reality. In bootstrap, the part appears simultaneously as the whole. Nature is conceived as a global entity, inseparable at a fundamental level. The particle plays the role of a system in the irreducible interaction with other systems, which is a first rapprochement between the bootstrap theory and the current systemic thinking.