Related papers: Nietzsche for physicists
In quantum gravity there is no notion of absolute time. Like all other quantities in the theory, the notion of time has to be introduced "relationally", by studying the behavior of some physical quantities in terms of others chosen as a…
In this PhD thesis the ancient question of determinism ('Does every event have a cause ?') will be re-examined. In the philosophy of science and physics communities the orthodox position states that the physical world is indeterministic:…
Julian Schwinger (1918--1994), founder of renormalized quantum electrodynamics, was arguably the leading theoretical physicist of the second half of the 20th century. Thus it is not surprising that he made contributions to gravity theory as…
In a foregoing paper, gravity has been interpreted as the pressure force exerted on matter at the scale of elementary particles by a perfect fluid. Under the condition that Newtonian gravity must be recovered in the incompressible case, a…
In this article, we argue that the theory of special relativity, as formulated by Einstein, is a philosophical rather than a scientific theory. What is scientific and experimentally supported is the formalism of the relativistic mechanics…
The paper starts with the proposal that the cause of the apparent insolubility of the free-will problem are several popular but strongly metaphysical notions and hypotheses. To reduce the metaphysics, some ideas are borrowed from physics. A…
Incomputability as a mathematical notion arose from work of Alan Turing and Alonzo Church in the 1930s. Like Turing himself, it attracted less attention than it deserved beyond the confines of mathematics. Today our experiences in computer…
Steven Weinberg was a giant of late 20th Century physics on whose shoulders we stand while groping for the science of the 21st Century. This article provides a too-brief summary of a selection of his many achievements -- eight decades of…
Since I first became enthralled with physics as a teenager, I've been intrigued by the philosophical aspects of the discipline. As I approached the end of my career as an experimental physicist and observational astronomer (I'm now…
This short note is devoted to non-proficient in physics. Its purpose is that of proposing a possible universal connection between the definition of Action given by Goethe in his ``Faust'' tragic play and the Hamilton's Principle of the…
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…
Physics has long lived with a schizophrenia that desires determinism for measured systems while demanding that experimenters decide what to measure on a whim. Intriguingly, such a free will assumption for experimenters has thwarted many…
The notions of time in the theories of Newton and Einstein are reviewed so that certain of their assumptions are clarified. These assumptions will be seen as the causes of the incompatibility between the two different ways of understanding…
In the year 1900 Max Planck was led by experimental observations to propose a strange formula for the intensity as a function of frequency for light emitted by a cavity. It relied on peculiar properties to be obeyed by the emitters and…
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.…
In the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, " 'I' is not the name of a person, nor 'here' of a place, .... But they are connected with names. ... [And] it is characteristic of physics not to use these words." This…
The objective of this paper is not simply to present an historical overview of Einstein's cosmological considerations, but to discuss the central role they played in shaping the paradigm of relativistic cosmology. This, we'll show, was a…
This article, written in honor of Fritz Rohrlich, briefly surveys the role of topology in physics.
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 onset and the development of the concept of exchange force in quantum physics are historically reconstructed, starting from Heisenberg's seminal contributions in 1926 and going through the great developments in nuclear physics, which…