Related papers: The Grand View of Physics
In this essay we wish to seek a unifying thread between the basic forces. We propose that there exists a universal force which is shared by all that physically exists. Universality is characterized by the two properties: (i) universal…
This entry reviews Rudolf Carnap's philosophical views on the quantum mechanics of his time. It also offers some thoughts on how Carnap might have reacted to some recent developments in the foundations of quantum mechanics.
Some time ago Wastlund reformulated the Basel problem in terms of a physical system using the proportionality of the apparent brightness of a star to the inverse square of its distance. Inspired by this approach, we give another physical…
A generalized view of Duality is offered as a bridge between physical sciences and the more abstract philosophical dimensions bordering on mysticism. To that end several examples of duality are first cited from from conventional physics…
A panoramic view, preceded by a short background of Newtonian mechanics and Maxwellian electrodynamics, is offered on the extent of how Einstein's space-time geometry, believed to be central to an understanding of the structure of the…
It is known that Einstein's conceptual base for his theory of relativity was the philosophy formulated by Immanuel Kant. Things appear differently to observers in different frames. However, Kant's Ding-an-Sich leads to the existence of the…
A.P. Balachandran was a theoretical physicist of extraordinary versatility and originality. In a career spanning over six decades, he made many significant contributions to quantum field theory and mathematical physics. His influence…
A physical theory of the world is presented under the unifying principle that all of nature is laid out before us and experienced through the passage of time. The one-dimensional progression in time is opened out into a multi-dimensional…
Scientists have measured that what we can see of space is about a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion (10^81) times the volume of an average human. Inflationary theory suggests that the entirety of space…
A unified framework for different formulations of quantum theoery is introduced specifying what is meant by a quantum mechanical theory in general.
A basic modern picture of the universe is given here. The lectures start from the historical ideas of a static universe. Then I move on to Newtonian cosmology and derive the main cosmological equations in the framework of Newtonian…
Feyerabend frequently discussed physics. He also referred to the history of the subject when motivating his philosophy of science. Alas, as some examples show, his understanding of physics remained superficial. In this respect, Feyerabend…
The fundamental physical theories that interpret and explain behaviour of matter in nature are dependent on several unobservables and insensibles in their construction. While a rigorous natural philosophy cannot take them for granted, there…
Physical laws are a set of rules in the relationship between observations made by the experimenter. All these observations are made through a mechanism that links the external world to the experimenter's awareness, a mechanism which is not…
We give arguments from the point of view of Gravitation as well as Electromagnetism which indicate a Machian view for the universe.
Are we smarter now than Socrates was in his time? Society as a whole certainly enjoys a higher degree of education, but humans as a species probably don't get intrinsically smarter with time. Our knowledge base, however, continues to grow…
A panoramic view seeks to trace the principal ideas governing the phenomenal growth of Nuclear Physics from a modest beginning in the Thirties, to an all-embracing field now protruding to the subhadronic on the one hand, and to high…
We state the defining characteristic of mathematics as a type of symmetry where one can change the connotation of a mathematical statement in a certain way when the statement's truth value remains the same. This view of mathematics as…
Understanding the deflection of light by a massive deflector, as well as the associated gravitational lens phenomena, require the use of the theory of General Relativity. I consider here a classical approach, based on Newton's equation of…
Two decades after its creation, the interpretation of quantum mechanics called QBism is entering a new phase. Since it shares a personalist, subjective world-view with phenomenology, the philosophical study of human experience, there is a…