Related papers: Reductionism and the Universal Calculus
A major question in philosophy of science involves the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics. Why should mathematics, created or discovered, with nothing empirical in mind be so perfectly suited to describe the laws of the…
Symbolic calculators like Mathematica are becoming more commonplace among upper level physics students. The presence of such a powerful calculator can couple strongly to the type of mathematical reasoning students employ. It does not merely…
Leibniz entertained various conceptions of infinitesimals, considering them sometimes as ideal things and other times as fictions. But in both cases, he compares infinitesimals favorably to imaginary roots. We agree with the majority of…
The objective is a foundation of physics from the operationalization of its basic observables. We begin with classical and relativistic kinematics. Seizing on a programmatic proposal by Heinrich Hertz we arrive via quantification of…
I argue for a full mathematisation of the physical theory, including its axioms, which must contain no physical primitives. In provocative words: "physics from no physics". Although this may seem an oxymoron, it is the royal road to keep…
Logic has pride of place in mathematics and its 20th century offshoot, computer science. Modern symbolic logic was developed, in part, as a way to provide a formal framework for mathematics: Frege, Peano, Whitehead and Russell, as well as…
Mathematics is a critical part of much scientific research. Physics in particular weaves math extensively into its instruction beginning in high school. Despite much research on the learning of both physics and math, the problem of how to…
Mathematics is one of the ways our species makes sense of this world and I believe that it is inherent in our thinking machinery. The mathematics we do in turn is dependent on the way we view our universe and ourselves. Lakoff and Nunez…
According to Eugene Wigner, quantum mechanics is a physics of Fourier transformations, and special relativity is a physics of Lorentz transformations. Since two-by-two matrices with unit determinant form the group SL(2,c) which acts as the…
Mathematicians invented Mathematics to escape from words, but at last they depend on them just as much as everybody else. At the end, all basic definitions will be reliant on words, yet the mathematician believes that he's elevated from…
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 fundamental impasses and ruptures in various domains of the canonical, unitary science, or the 'end of science', become the more and more evident. The natural unity of being is recovered within a universal nonperturbative method leading…
I discuss some problems related to extreme mathematical realism, focusing on a recently proposed "shut-up-and-calculate" approach to physics (arXiv:0704.0646, arXiv:0709.4024). I offer arguments for a moderate alternative, the essence of…
Following an article by John von Neumann on infinite tensor products, we develop the idea that the usual formalism of quantum mechanics, associated with unitary equivalence of representations, stops working when countable infinities of…
The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the role of language in the process of teaching and learning mathematics. We will begin with the definition of mathematics given by Cassiodorus (in its essential features repeated in Kolmogorov's…
Physics is formulated in terms of timeless classical mathematics. A formulation on the basis of intuitionist mathematics, built on time-evolving processes, would offer a perspective that is closer to our experience of physical reality.
The paradox of Wigner's friend challenges the objectivity of description in quantum theory. A pragmatist interpretation can meet this challenge by judicious appeal to decoherence. On this interpretation, quantum theory provides situated…
An ultimate universal theory -- a complete theory that accounts, via few and simple first principles, for all the phenomena already observed and that will ever be observed -- has been, and still is, the aspiration of most physicists and…
Frauchiger and Renner recently cast doubt on the universal applicability of Quantum Mechanics [1]. In the following, it is pointed out that their conclusion of one of three common-sense conditions, demanded for Quantum Mechanics, being…
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…