Related papers: Nietzsche for physicists
We reanalyze from a modern perspective the bold idea of G. Helm, W. Ostwald, P. Duhem and others that energy is the fundamental entity composing the physical world. We start from a broad perspective reminding the search for a fundamental…
Carl Gustav Hempel (1905-1997) formulated the dilemma that carries his name in an attempt to determine the boundaries of physics. Where does physics go over into metaphysics? The purpose of this contribution is to indicate how a recently…
Henry Stapp has for 60 years been a leader, perhaps the leader, in exploring the role of mind (psyche, consciousness, experience) in the ontology of quantum mechanics. Henry's contention is that the very structure of quantum mechanics…
Quantum Mechanics (QM) has faced deep controversies and debates since its origin when Werner Heisenberg proposed the first mathematical formalism capable to operationally account for what had been recently discovered as the new field of…
Niels Bohr wrote: "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature." In an…
Before Alan Turing made his crucial contributions to the theory of computation, he studied the question of whether quantum mechanics could throw light on the nature of free will. This article investigates the roles of quantum mechanics and…
Maxwell's mature presentation of his equations emphasized the unity of electromagnetism and mechanics, subsuming both as "dynamical systems". That intuition of unity has proved both fruitful, as a source of pregnant concepts, and broadly…
Time machines are predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity and provide a myriad of unsolved paradoxes. Convincing and general arguments against time machines and their paradoxes are missing in physics and philosophy so far. In…
We still lack any consensus about what one is actually talking about as one uses quantum mechanics. There is a gap between the abstract terms in which the theory is couched and the phenomena the theory enables each of us to account for so…
The discussion on time-reversal in quantum mechanics exists at least since Wigner's ``Uber die Operation der Zeitumkehr in der Quantenmechanik'' paper in 1932. If and how the dynamics of the quantum world is time-reversible has been the…
I reflect on some of the basic aspects of present day Beyond the Standard Model particle physics, focusing mostly on the issues of naturalness, in particular on the so-called hierarchy problem. To all of us, physics as natural science…
This paper takes James David Forbes' Encyclopaedia Britannica entry, Dissertation Sixth, as a lens to examine physics as a cognitive, practical, and social, enterprise. Forbes wrote this survey of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century…
This history of the concept of fact reveals that the fact-oriented practices of German physicists and historians derived from common origins. The concept of fact became part of the German language remarkably late. It gained momentum only…
Classical physics is generally regarded as deterministic, as opposed to quantum mechanics that is considered the first theory to have introduced genuine indeterminism into physics. We challenge this view by arguing that the alleged…
Our understanding of the four basic concepts of Physics -- space, time, matter and force -- has undergone radical change in the course of work on unification, starting with Maxwell's unification of electricity with magnetism, all the way to…
Albert Einstein's practice in physics and his philosophical positions gradually reoriented themselves from more empiricist towards rationalist viewpoints. This change accompanied his turn towards unified field theory and different…
Quantum mechanics can be formulated in three ways, as Heisenberg, Schr\"odinger and Feynman did respectively. For the last way, an unknown (i.e. forgotten) forerunner exists, that we have found in a paper by Gregor Wentzel, published before…
The zeroth theorem of the history of science (enunciated by E. P. Fischer) and widely known in the mathematics community as Arnol'd's Principle (decreed by M. V. Berry), states that a discovery (rule, regularity, insight) named after…
The evolution of theoretical physics in the XX century differs significantly from that in XVII-XIX centuries. While continuous progress is observed for theoretical physics in XVII-XIX centuries, modern physics contains many questions that…
Einstein regarded as one of the triumphs of his 1915 theory of gravity --- the general theory of relativity --- that it vindicated the action--reaction principle, while Newtonian mechanics as well as his 1905 special theory of relativity…