Principles of the Quantum World: The Vaiśeṣika Categories as an Ontology for Quanta, Composition, and Persistence

The categories of the Vaiśeṣika Sūtra of Kaṇāda, substance, attribute, action, generality, particularity and inherence, are read as an ontology for the quantum world within a plenum framework in which space is one energy substrate with electro-, magneto- and info-dominant attributes. Twelve principles follow, each taken from a sūtra and set against measurement: a substrate with measurable properties (Casimir force, Lamb shift); a potentiality that is neither attribute nor action (Born’s rule); a determinate foundation and an ordered succession (exact h and e, shell closures); a floor of action, circulation and formation (h, h/2e, h/m, an electron point-like below 10^(-19) m); composition from the number, magnitude and arrangement of constituents, which recovers the hydrogen atom from its parts to 1×10^(-11) u and makes the proton’s mass 99 per cent arrangement; conjunction and disjunction in three modes with thresholds; persistence in three tiers, from 5.6×10^(-24) s to beyond 10^34 years; discrete action (quantum jumps); inheritance of attributes (the conservation laws, and Pauli’s inference of the neutrino); number and separateness (exclusion and condensation); the relativity of scale (correspondence and molecular interference); and inherence (loophole-free Bell tests). By the Sūtra’s threefold cause the principles give the formation, in principle, of the electron, the proton, the neutron, the neutrino, ephemeral in flavour and persistent in existence, and the hydrogen atom. They predict that neither neutrinoless double beta decay nor proton decay will be found, and the framework predicts a plenum share 1/D of a few parts in 10^12 in atomic binding.