Related papers: Nietzsche for physicists
This article proposes a fresh and direct reading of foundational texts of philosophy and aims at bringing back the inflamed debates that are contemporaneous with the birth of Greek axiomatics, and indeed at understanding what is timeless in…
Both Albert Einstein and Erwin Schr\"{o}dinger have defined what science is. Einstein includes not only physics, but also all natural sciences dealing with both organic and inorganic processes in his definition of science. According to…
What is sometimes called the "totalitarian principle," a metaphysical doctrine often associated with the famous physicist Murray Gell-Mann, states that everything allowed by the laws of nature must actually exist. The principle is closely…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
Eugene Wigner famously argued for the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" for describing physics and other natural sciences in his 1960 essay. That essay has now led to some 55 years of (sometimes anguished) soul searching ---…
In the present essay we attempt to reconstruct Newtonian mechanics under the guidance of logical principles and of a constructive approach related to the genetic epistemology of J. Piaget and R. Garc\'ia \citep{piag89}. Instead of…
The present discussion concerning certain fundamental physical theories (such as string theory and multiverse cosmology) has reopened the demarcation problem between science and non-science. While parts of the physics community see the…
Starting from the revelation of the nature of inertial forces, this article discusses the subdivision of the basic physical concept of space-time and raises questions about the metric of standard cosmology. A new form of particle dynamics…
It is pointed out that recent cosmological findings seem to support the view that the mass/energy distribution of the universe defines the Newtonian inertial frames as originally suggested by Mach. The background concepts of inertial frame,…
Proposed by Wolfgang Pauli more than 80 years ago, the exclusion principle has been proven to have a far-reaching consequence, from femtoscopic world to macroscopic, super-dense, and fully relativistic physics. Starting from this principle,…
John von Neumann's transformation from a logician of quantum mechanics (QM) in the 1920s to a natural philosopher of computation in the 1950s is discussed. The paper argues for revision of the historical image of Neumann to portray his…
Based on a physical monism, which holds that the matter and space are classified by not a difference of their kind but a difference of magnitude of their density, I derive the most fundamental equation of motion, which is capable of…
Part 1 : For more than two millennia, ever since Euclid's geometry, the so called Archimedean Axiom has been accepted without sufficiently explicit awareness of that fact. The effect has been a severe restriction of our views of space-time,…
Experiments may not reveal their full import at the time that they are performed. The scientists who perform them usually are testing a specific hypothesis and quite often have specific expectations limiting the possible inferences that can…
Historically, Ehrenfest's theorem (1927) is the first one which shows that classical physics can emerge from quantum physics as a kind of approximation. We recall the theorem in its original form. Next, we highlight its generalizations to…
A brief review of Heisenberg's life and work: participating in the youth movement in the aftermath of World War I, creating quantum mechanics, conflict with "deutsche Physik", involvement in "Hitler's Uranium Project", last illusions.…
Superconductivity is macroscopic quantum phenomenon. From force of habit most physicists pay no heed to a paradoxicality of this fact. Niels Bohr considered quantum mechanics as atomic physics and the paradoxical quantum principles may be…
According to Schopenhauer, Kant's arguments about the transcendental ideality of space and time can be extended to matter through the concept of causality and the principle of sufficient reason. In this article, I examine to what extent…
Assuming that the universe is a system obedient to known thermodynamic laws and equations, here we explore whether it is a possibility for the universe to exist and evolve without any cosmic structure or force necessarily emerging within…
In his monumental discoveries, the driving force for Einstein was, I believe, consistency of concept and principle rather than conflict with experiment. Following this Einsteinian dictum, we would first argue that homogeneity (universal…