Related papers: Nietzsche for physicists
A hundred years ago, the quantum concept provoked a revolution in science and the search of a new conceptual basis for whole physics, as emphasized by Einstein. In this paper, I discuss the essential features of Planck's works in 1900 on…
Carlo Cercignani was known all over the world for his works on the Boltzmann equation and on kinetic theory. There was however another aspect of his scientific life, which is not much known. Namely, his interest for the foundations of…
This article is a summary of a talk about Richard Feynman, given at a conference Polymaths across the Eras organized in November 2023 by the St Cross Centre for the History and Philosophy of Physics (HAPP) in Oxford. It describes Feynman as…
The classical theory of electrodynamics is built upon Maxwell's equations and the concepts of electromagnetic field, force, energy, and momentum, which are intimately tied together by Poynting's theorem and the Lorentz force law. Whereas…
Free will is an old philosophical enigma that has been recently revived by neuropsychology. We restrict ourselves to the problem that determinism seems to allow only an illusion of freedom but random decissions do not contain any freedom…
Isaac Newton, in popular imagination the Ur-scientist, was an outstanding humanist scholar. His researches on, among others, ancient philosophy, are thorough and appear to be connected to and fit within his larger philosophical and…
In this short paper a new thought experiment has been introduced to illustrate the famous Heisenberg's uncertainty principle based on Otto-Wiener's experiment (1890) associated with standing light waves. This illustration is quite easy as…
Starting from general considerations, some ideas of the philosopher Derek Parfit on consciousness, self-awareness, and reductionism are briefly reviewed and critically examined from the standpoint of physics.
Experiment plays a decisive role in physics. It is the single source of our understanding of nature. But, during the last century the main accent in theoretical physics has moved toward metaphysics. Some mathematicians/theoreticians try to…
Abner Shimony was an exceptional human being and a remarkably lucid and penetrating thinker whose work centered on some of the most significant physical and philosophical questions of his era at their nexus. He approached these questions…
Verlinde's ideas considered gravity as an emergent force originated from entropic concepts. This hypothesis generated a huge number of papers through the last recent years concerning classical and quantum approaches about the issue. In a…
The concept of infinity took centuries to achieve recognized status in the field of mathematics, despite the fact that it was implicitly present in nearly all mathematical endeavors. Here I explore the idea that a similar development might…
When most people think of physics, they think of what they learned in high school physics: that the world is fundamentally predictable. Given the position and velocity of a particle in space, it should be possible to predict its position at…
In this paper I propose a new principle in physics: the principle of "finiteness". It stems from the definition of physics as a science that deals (among other things) with measurable dimensional physical quantities. Since measurement…
The historical and conceptual foundations of General Relativity are revisited, putting the main focus on the physical meaning of the invariant ds, the Equivalence Principle, and the precise interpretation of spacetime geometry. It is argued…
The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been discussed since this theme first was brought up by Einstein and Bohr. This article describes a proposal for a new foundation of quantum theory, partly drawing upon ideas from statistical…
After some brief biographical notes, Wolfgang Pauli's main contributions to general relativity, quantum theory, quantum field theory, and elementary particle physics are reviewed. A detailed description is given how Pauli descovered -…
Similarities between the non-deterministic nature of quantum theory and the unpredictable patterns of human cognition and decision making have been observed and commented on many times since the invention of Quantum Mechanics in the first…
Our concept of mass has evolved considerably over the centuries, most notably from Newton to Einstein, and then even more vigorously with the establishment of the standard model and the subsequent discovery of the Higgs boson. Mass is now…
This is a philosophy-intense physics article, or, if you wish, a physics-intense philosophy article. Also, being a mathematician, I tend to view the physics, in particular the essence of quantum physics, in emphasizing the mathematical…