Related papers: Is Physics Sick? [In Praise of Classical Physics]
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
In this paper, we argue that there are foundational dilemmas in theoretical physics related to the concept of reality and the nature of mathematics in physics. Physical theory is treated as a conceptual organism which develops under the…
Contrary to claims about the irrelevance of philosophy for science, I argue that philosophy has had, and still has, far more influence on physics than is commonly assumed. I maintain that the current anti-philosophical ideology has had…
This article frames the relation between biology and physics by characterizing the former as a subdiscipline rather than a special case of the latter. To do this, we posit biological physics as the science of living matter in contrast to…
The view of nature we adopt in the natural attitude is determined by common sense, without which we could not survive. Classical physics is modelled on this common-sense view of nature, and uses mathematics to formalise our natural…
However, the observations encompassed by classical physics excludes the observer from the physical reality, yet the deep-down understandung of nature --{\it the quantum theory}-- can not avoid the intrusion of observer into the measurement…
In this essay, I argue that mathematics is a natural science---just like physics, chemistry, or biology---and that this can explain the alleged "unreasonable" effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences. The main challenge for…
The human mind is endowed with innate primordial perceptions such as space, distance, motion, change, flow of time, matter. The field of cognitive science argues that the abstract concepts of mathematics are not Platonic, but are built in…
In the context of theories of the connection between mind and brain, physicalism is the demand that all is basically purely physical. But the concept of "physical" embodied in this demand is characterized essentially by the properties of…
What is a physical theory? Although this intriguing question has been addressed from many different perspectives, some physicists and philosophers of physics have implicitly or explicitly embraced a philosophically-neutral definition of a…
The concept of the physical state of a system is ubiquitous in physics but is usually presented in terms of specific cases. For example, the state of a point particle of mass m is completely characterized by its position and momentum. There…
A vast body of literature addresses the complex nature of science's reproducibility crisis. In contrast with this perceived complexity, some recent papers from the discipline of physics suggests that irreproducibility does not point to a…
This is the first of a series of papers that we intend to publish about the epistemology of fundamental physics in its current state. One of the main objectives of these papers is to improve our understanding of fundamental physics (and…
Being mathematics a natural language to Mankind and to physics, it must be constantly adapted to our necessities and our natural perception. Then, mathematical concepts are not absolute to reality. Although mathematical theories are…
We lay the groundwork for a formal framework that studies scientific theories and can serve as a unified foundation for the different theories within physics. We define a scientific theory as a set of verifiable statements, assertions that…
A tradition handed down among physicists maintains that classical physics is a perfectly deterministic theory capable of predicting the future with absolute certainty, independently of any interpretations. It also tells that it was quantum…
This paper is concerned with complex macroscopic behaviour arising in many-body systems through the combinations of competitive interactions and disorder, even with simple ingredients at the microscopic level. It attempts to indicate and…
Classical physics is generally regarded as deterministic, as opposed to quantum mechanics that is considered the first theory to have introduced genuine indeterminism into physics. We challenge this view by arguing that the alleged…
I show that Aristotelian physics is a correct and non-intuitive approximation of Newtonian physics in the suitable domain (motion in fluids), in the same technical sense in which Newton theory is an approximation of Einstein's theory.…