ABSTRACT
Many, if not all our problems of understanding quantum mechanics seem to have one common source, namely a mismatch between the implicit ontology of quantum theory and the ontology we take for granted when we talk about micro-phenomena. The foundation of quantum theory is wave mechanics. But when we talk about the quantum world we usually take a particle ontology for granted: we talk about electrons, neutrons, photons etc as if they were corpuscles, objects with well-defined positions and confined to certain volumes of space. The fact that, for example, electrons cannot in general be attributed a definite position is thus often interpreted epistemologically: we cannot know an electron’s exact position, although we take for granted that it has a well-defined one. As waves and corpuscles have different properties, we meet difficulties when we use the superposition principle (a principle valid for waves) for the description of the motion of quantum objects conceived as corpuscles. By its very nature, a corpuscle cannot be subject to the superposition principle.
