Related papers: Dialogue Concerning The Two Chief World Views
Principles in the form of heuristic guidelines or generally accepted dogma play an important role in the development of physical theories. In particular, philosophical considerations and principles figure prominently in the work of Albert…
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…
I offer a revisionist interpretation of Galileo's role in the history of science. My overarching thesis is that Galileo lacked technical ability in mathematics, and that this can be seen as directly explaining numerous aspects of his life's…
Theories of decoherence come in two flavors---Platonic and Aristotelian. Platonists grant ontological primacy to the concepts and mathematical symbols by which we describe or comprehend the physical world. Aristotelians grant it to the…
Johann Kepler (1571-1630) is sometimes considered as a precursor of science-fiction novels with the writing of "Somnium, sive opus posthumum of astronomia lunaris". In this work published posthumously in 1634 by his son Ludwig, Kepler…
This paper provides an overview of recent historical research regarding scientifically-informed challenges to the idea that the stars are other suns orbited by other inhabited earths -- an idea that came to be known as "the Plurality of…
A number of elite thinkers in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries pursued an agenda which historian Paolo Rossi calls the "quest for a universal language," a quest which was deeply interwoven with the emergence of the scientific…
The feud between Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton has remained ongoing even after 300 years, over whether Newton should have acknowledged Hooke's influence on his graphical method of constructing planet orbits, the celebrated Proposition 1,…
There is a deeply entrenched view in philosophy and physics, the closed systems view, according to which isolated systems are conceived of as fundamental. On this view, when a system is under the influence of its environment this is…
This paper describes a series of activities in which students investigate and use the Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic models of planetary motion. The activities guide students through using open source software to discover important…
There are two main opposing schools of statistical reasoning, Frequentist and Bayesian approaches. Until recent days, the frequentist or classical approach has dominated the scientific research, but Bayesianism has reappeared with a strong…
Counterfactuals have become an important area of interdisciplinary interest, especially in logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, psychology, decision theory, and even artificial intelligence. In this study, we propose a…
For more than half a century, dualities have been at the heart of modern physics. From quantum mechanics to statistical mechanics, condensed matter physics, quantum field theory and quantum gravity, dualities have proven useful in solving…
David Gauthier in his article, Maximization constrained: the rationality of cooperation, tries to defend the joint strategy in situations in which no outcome is both equilibrium and optimal. Prisoner Dilemma is the most familiar example of…
This work presents a brief and non-technical description of the main results and concepts of the modern scientific cosmology, viewing it from an epistemological perspective which allows a dialog with other modes of thinking like e.g.…
Within the framework of relativistic cosmology oscillating or cyclic models of the universe were introduced by A. Friedmann in his seminal paper of 1922. With the recognition of evolutionary cosmology in the 1930s this class of closed…
We re-evaluate the great Leibniz-Newton calculus debate, exactly three hundred years after it culminated, in 1712. We reflect upon the concept of invention, and to what extent there were indeed two independent inventors of this new…
In this work, an attempt is presented to understand the contribution of Galileo Galilei in the field of the History of Ideas, from the moment he points a spyglass to the sky. For that, it was previously necessary that Giotto painting the…
A large literature suggests that people are intuitive Dualists--they consider the mind ethereal, distinct from the body. Past research also shows that Dualism emerges, in part, via learning (e.g., Barlev & Shtulman, 2021). But whether…
Recently a cubic Galileon cosmological model was derived by the assumption that the field equations are invariant under the action of point transformations. The cubic Galileon model admits a second conservation law which means that the…