Related papers: Fundamental Dilemmas in Theoretical Physics
The question of what ontological message (if any) is encoded in the formalism of contemporary physics is, to say the least, controversial. The reasons for this state of affairs are psychological and neurobiological. The processes by which…
I explore whether it is possible to make sense of the quantum mechanical description of physical reality by taking the proper subject of physics to be correlation and only correlation, and by separating the problem of understanding the…
I review the philosophical literature on the question of when two physical theories are equivalent. This includes a discussion of empirical equivalence, which is often taken to be necessary, and sometimes taken to be sufficient, for…
Quantum mechanics is a fundamentally probabilistic theory (at least so far as the empirical predictions are concerned). It follows that, if one wants to properly understand quantum mechanics, it is essential to clearly understand the…
The physical models of a successful unified theory about the Universe must operate in different phase of matter evolution and different fields of physics. The attempts to build such wide range theory as a bunch of theories developed for…
Fundamental physics today is best defined operationally: it is the program of identifying the microscopic degrees of freedom, symmetries, and dynamical laws that (i) reproduce the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, General Relativity…
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…
We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time…
The dynamics of physical theories is usually described by differential equations. Difference equations then appear mainly as an approximation which can be used for a numerical analysis. As such, they have to fulfill certain conditions to…
A new mathematics, the constructive one, characterizes a singular limit as undecidable. Hence, a singular limit between two theories actually represents a difference between two different kinds of mathematics. This particular situation…
General relativity poses serious problems for counterfactual propositions peculiar to it as a physical theory. Because these problems arise solely from the dynamical nature of spacetime geometry, they are shared by all schools of thought on…
Quantum mechanics, one of the most successful theories in the history of science, was created to account for physical systems not describable by classical physics. Though it is consistent with all experiments conducted thus far, many of its…
We argue that the main reason of crisis in quantum theory is that nature, which is fundamentally discrete and even finite, is described by classical mathematics involving the notions of infinitely small, continuity etc. Moreover, since…
Since its emergence, quantum mechanics has been a challenge for an understanding of reality which is based on our intuition in a classical world. Nevertheless, it has often been tried to impose this understanding of reality on quantum…
Is speculative mathematics dangerous? Recent interactions between physics and mathematics pose the question with some force: traditional mathematical norms discourage speculation, but it is the fabric of theoretical physics. In practice…
Despite its apparent complexity, our world seems to be governed by simple laws of physics. This volume provides a philosophical introduction to such laws. I explain how they are connected to some of the central issues in philosophy, such as…
Recent critiques of the semantic conception of scientific theories suggest that a theory is not best formulated as a collection of models satisfying some set of kinematical or dynamical conditions. Thus it has been argued that additional…
This paper proposes a basic theory on physical reality, and a new foundation for quantum mechanics and classical mechanics. It does not only solve the problem of the arbitrariness on the operator ordering for the quantization procedure, but…
Metaphysics is traditionally conceived as aiming at the truth -- indeed, the most fundamental truths about the most general features of reality. Philosophical naturalists, urging that philosophical claims be grounded on science, have often…
Though the truths of logic and pure mathematics are objective and independent of any contingent facts or laws of nature, our knowledge of these truths depends entirely on our knowledge of the laws of physics. Recent progress in the quantum…