Related papers: Scientific Realism and Classical Physics
Physics was in crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century because the newborn Maxwell's electromagnetism defied mechanistic preconceptions. Albert Einstein understood that the solution to the crisis required an audacious reworking of…
The nature of space-time and surrounding matter objects was and persists to be a one of the most intriguing and challenging problems facing the mankind and natural scientists especially. As we know one of the most brilliant inventions in…
The first three sections of this article contain a broad brush summary of the profound changes in the notion of time in fundamental physics that were brought about by three revolutions: the foundations of mechanics distilled by Newton in…
Classical physics has enabled the acquisition of significant knowledge of the physical properties of nature on a standard macroscopic scale. These achievements were driven by use of the causal ontological approach (proposed originally by…
Einstein's special theory of relativity starts with assumptions about how observations conducted in relatively moving inertial frames must compare. From these assumptions, conclusions can be drawn regarding the laws of physics in any one…
We sketch the foundations of classical electrodynamics, in particular the transition that took place when Einstein, in 1915, succeeded to formulate general relativity. In 1916 Einstein demonstrated that, with a choice of suitable variables…
At the end of the 19th century light was regarded as an electromagnetic wave propagating in a material medium called ether. The speed c appearing in Maxwell's wave equations was the speed of light with respect to the ether. Therefore,…
In the last 175 years, the physical understanding of nature has seen a revolutionary change. Until about 1850, Newton's theory and the mechanical world view derived from it provided the dominant view of the physical world, later…
With his General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein produced a revolution in our conception of reality and of the knowledge we can obtain from it. This revolution can be viewed from philosophy as leading to one of the great paradigms in…
The Einstein theories of space-time and gravity as well the stander cosmology are reconstructed thoroughly in this paper based on flat reference frame. The rational parts of the Einstein theories are reserved while the irrational parts…
The Einstein theories of space-time and gravity as well the stander cosmology are reconstructed thoroughly in this paper based on flat reference frame. The rational parts of the Einstein theories are reserved while the irrational parts…
Einstein's theory of general relativity describes gravity as the interaction of particles with space-time geometry, as opposed to interacting with a physical fluid, as in the old gravitational aether theories. Moreover, any theoretical…
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…
The unification of electricity and magnetism achieved by special relativity has remained for decades a model of unification in theoretical physics. We discuss the relationship between electric and magnetic fields from a classical point of…
In recent decades there has been a resurge of interest in the foundations of quantum theory, partly motivated by new experimental techniques, partly by the emerging field of quantum information science. Old questions, asked since the…
Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity was proposed a little over a hundred years back. It remained a bedrock of twentieth century physics right up to Quantum Field Theory. However, the failure over several decades to provide a unified…
Einstein's dream of describing elementary particles as solutions of a classical field theory is severely limited by our current understanding of Nature. Quantum theory is inconsistent with any local realistic theory such as evolving…
Einstein's contribution to relativity is reviewed. It is pointed out that Weyl gave first unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism and it was different than the five dimensional theory of Kaluza. Einstein began his work on…
Classical mechanics, relativity, electrodynamics and quantum mechanics are often depicted as separate realms of physics, each with its own formalism and notion. This remains unsatisfactory with respect to the unity of nature and to the…
A goal of physics is to understand the greatest possible breadth of natural phenomena in terms of the most economical set of basic concepts. However, as the understanding of physics has developed historically, its pedagogy and language have…