Related papers: Is Physics Sick? [In Praise of Classical Physics]
According to scientific realism, science gives us an approximately true description of what the world is like. But what does it mean? In this chapter, we focus on the ontological and metaphysical aspects of this discussion. That is, we are…
We analyse the implications of the closure of the physical for experiments in the scientific study of consciousness when all the details are considered, especially how measurement results relate to physical events. It turns out that the…
Differentiable physics provides a new approach for modeling and understanding the physical systems by pairing the new technology of differentiable programming with classical numerical methods for physical simulation. We survey the rapidly…
Many physicists, following Einstein, believe that the ultimate aim of theoretical physics is to find a unified theory of all interactions which would not depend on any free dimensionless constant, i.e., a dimensionless constant that is only…
We re-examine the old question to what extent mathematics may be compared with a game. Mainly inspired by Hilbert and Wittgenstein, our answer is that mathematics is something like a rhododendron of language games, where the rules are…
Some aspects of the physical nature of language are discussed. In particular, physical models of language must exist that are efficiently implementable. The existence requirement is essential because without physical models no communication…
The centuries-long practice of the teaching turned mechanics into an academic construct detached from its underlying science, the physics of macroscopic bodies. In particular, the regularities that delineate the scope of validity of…
The distinction between a theory's kinematics and its dynamics, that is, between the space of physical states it posits and its law of evolution, is central to the conceptual framework of many physicists. A change to the kinematics of a…
Gravitation theory is formulated as gauge theory on natural bundles with spontaneous symmetry breaking where gauge symmetries are general covariant transformations, gauge fields are general linear connections, and Higgs fields are…
This is the introductive paper to the volume "Symmetries in Physics: Philosophical Reflections", Cambridge University Press, 2003. We begin with a brief description of the historical roots and emergence of the concept of symmetry that is at…
In recent years philosophers of science have explored categorical equivalence as a promising criterion for when two (physical) theories are equivalent. On the one hand, philosophers have presented several examples of theories whose…
We are used to the fact that most if not all physical theories are based on the set of real numbers (or another associative division algebra). These all have a cardinality larger than that of the natural numbers, i.e. form a continuum. It…
This essay discusses the idea that a Theory of Everything would not be complete without a theory of consciousness as one of its parts, and the suggestion that new physics may be needed to describe consciousness. I argue that the motivations…
We propose an interpretation of physics named potentiality realism. This view, which can be applied to classical as well as to quantum physics, regards potentialities (i.e. intrinsic, objective propensities for individual events to obtain)…
More than a speculative technology, quantum computing seems to challenge our most basic intuitions about how the physical world should behave. In this thesis I show that, while some intuitions from classical computer science must be…
Imagine a naive organism who does not know anything about the world. It can capture signals through its sensors and it can make actions. What kind of knowledge about the world is accessible to the organism? This situation is analog to that…
This is a philosophy-intense physics article, or, if you wish, a physics-intense philosophy article. Also, being a mathematician, I tend to view the physics, in particular the essence of quantum physics, in emphasizing the mathematical…
Physicality has the bad habit of sneaking up on unsuspecting physicists. Unfortunately, it comes in multitudinous incarnations, which will not always make sense in a given situation. Breaching a warp drive metric with physical arguments is…
Intuitively, the more powerful a theory is, the greater the variety and quantity of ideas can be expressed through its formal language. Therefore, when comparing two theories concerning the same subject, it seems only reasonable to compare…
Physics as a discipline embeds conceptual meaning about the physical world in mathematical formalism. The meaning associated with mathematical symbols depends on context, and physicists can shift conceptual meaning by manipulating those…