Related papers: Inferential vs. Dynamical Conceptions of Physics
Although time is one of our most intuitive physical concepts, its understanding at the fundamental level is still an open question in physics. For instance, time in quantum mechanics and general relativity are two distinct and incompatible…
In recent publications in physics and mathematics, concerns have been raised about the use of real numbers to describe quantities in physics, and in particular about the usual assumption that physical quantities are infinitely precise. In…
How should we interpret physical theories, and especially quantum theory, if we drop the assumption that we should treat it as an exact description of the whole Universe? I expound and develop the claim that physics is about the study of…
Experiments violating Bell's inequality appear to indicate deterministic models do not correspond to a realistic theory of quantum mechanics. The theory of pilot waves seemingly overcomes this hurdle via nonlocality and statistical…
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…
I contrast the profound differences in the ways in which algebra and analysis are used in physics. In particular I discuss the fascinating phenomenon that theoretical physicists devote almost all their efforts to algebraic problems even…
This work reflects on mechanics as an epistemological framework on the state of a physical system to regard dynamics as the distribution of mechanical properties over spacetime coordinates. The resulting distribution is taken to be the…
Nonlinear dynamics (``chaos theory'') and quantum mechanics are two of the scientific triumphs of the 20th century. The former lies at the heart of the modern interdisciplinary approach to science, whereas the latter has revolutionized…
The implications of the physical theory of quantum mechanics on the question of realism is much a subject of sustaining interest, while the background questions among physicists on how to think about all the theoretical notion and…
The question about the existence of so-called ``hidden'' variables in quantum mechanics and the perception of the completeness of quantum mechanics are two sides of the same coin. Quantum analytical mechanics constitutes a completion of…
Einstein initially objected to the probabilistic aspect of quantum mechanics - the idea that God is playing at dice. Later he changed his ground, and focussed instead on the point that the Copenhagen Interpretation leads to what Einstein…
Classical statistical particle mechanics in the configuration space can be represented by a nonlinear Schrodinger equation. Even without assuming the existence of deterministic particle trajectories, the resulting quantum-like statistical…
Einstein conjectured long ago that much of quantum mechanics might be derived as a statistical formalism describing the dynamics of classical systems. Bell's Theorem experiments have ruled out complete equivalence between quantum field…
Social physics is the application of ideas, concepts and tools from physics to study social phenomena. In this article, we present a mechanical theory underlying a mathematical treatment of social physics. We explore the possibility of…
Since the problem: "What is statistics?" is most fundamental in sceince, in order to solve this problem, there is every reason to believe that we have to start from the proposal of a worldview. Recently we proposed measurement theory (i.e.,…
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…
It is often said that quantum and classical randomness are of different nature, the former being ontological and the latter epistemological. However, so far the question of "What is quantum in quantum randomness", i.e. what is the impact of…
What is Statistics? Opinions vary. In fact, there is a continuous spectrum of attitudes toward statistics ranging from pure theoreticians, proving asymptotic efficiency and searching for most powerful tests, to wild practitioners, blindly…
The connection is established between two theories that have developed independently with the aim to describe quantum mechanics as a stochastic process, namely stochastic quantum mechanics (sqm) and stochastic electrodynamics (sed).…
It is shown that the independence of the continuum hypothesis points to the unique definite status of the set of intermediate cardinality: the intermediate set exists only as a subset of continuum. This latent status is a consequence of…