Related papers: Nietzsche for physicists
Wolfgang Pauli's philosophy and physics were intertwined. His philosophy was a variety of Platonism, in which Pauli's affiliation with Carl Jung formed an integral part, but Pauli's philosophical explorations in physics appeared before he…
The recent discovery that Einstein once attempted - and quickly abandoned - a steady-state model of the expanding universe sheds new light on his philosophical journey from static to dynamic cosmologies.
The concept of mechanical work is inherited from the concepts of potentia absoluta and men's work, both implemented in the Section IX of Daniel Bernoulli's Hydrodynamica in 1738. Nonetheless, Bernoulli did not confuse those two entities: he…
Entropy is a quantity which is of great importance in physics and chemistry. The concept comes out of thermodynamics, proposed by Rudolf Clausius in his analysis of Carnot cycle and linked by Ludwig Boltzmann to the number of specific ways…
Starting with Einstein's famous papers of 1905, we review some of the ensuing developments and their impact on present-day physics. We attempt to cover topics that are of interest to historians and philosophers of science as well as to…
The procedure used to "do physics" in the macroscopic world is familiar: You take an object, start it off with a particular position and velocity, subject it to known forces (say gravity or friction, or both), and follow its trajectory. You…
This is a work of hard physical philosophy, where Quantum Perspectivism is shown to function as both an interpretation of quantum mechanics and a physical model for understanding Nietzsche's perspectivism. This framework combines quantum…
Einstein is usually revered as the father of special and general relativity. In this article I demonstrate that he is also the father of Solid State Physics, or even his broader version known as Condensed Matter Physics (including liquids).…
We explore the different meanings of "quantum uncertainty" contained in Heisenberg's seminal paper from 1927, and also some of the precise definitions that were explored later. We recount the controversy about "Anschaulichkeit",…
Discussions surrounding the nature of the infinite in mathematics have been underway for two millennia. Mathematicians, philosophers, and theologians have all taken part. The basic question has been whether the infinite exists only in…
A new direction to understand gravity has recently been explored by considering classical gravity to be a derived interaction from an underlying theory. This underlying theory would involve new degrees of freedom at a deeper level and it…
A sketch of three senses of emergence and a suggestive view on the emergence of time and the direction of time is presented. After trying to identify which issues philosophers interested in emergent phenomena in physics view as important I…
We analyze Einstein's views on God and religion, and his views on Quantum Mechanics.
In a recent preprint [1] Jeffrey Bub presents a discussion of neo-Bohrian interpretations of quantum mechanics, and also of von Neumann's work on infinite tensor products [2]. He rightfully writes that this work provides a theoretical…
In recent centuries the world has become increasingly dominated by empirical evidence and theoretic science in developing worldviews. Advances in science have dictated Roman Catholic doctrine such as the acceptance of Darwinian evolution…
We analyze some of Einstein's failures to accomplish tasks which he posed to himself, notably deterministic interpretation of Quantum mechanics and formulation of the Unified theory of physical interactions, putting them into broader…
Ludwig Boltzmann had a hunch that irreversibility exhibited by a macroscopic system arises from the reversible dynamics of its microscopic constituents. He derived a nonlinear integro-differential equation - now called the Boltzmann…
It is not very well known that the philosopher Karl Popper has been one of the foremost critics of the orthodox interpretation of quantum physics for about six decades. This paper reconstructs in detail most of Popper's activities on…
The science of complexity is based on a new way of thinking that stands in sharp contrast to the philosophy underlying Newtonian science, which is based on reductionism, determinism, and objective knowledge. This paper reviews the…
Einstein's most famous equation -- $E=mc^2$ -- generated a short-circuit between the concepts of mass and energy, which also affects other concepts like matter, radiation, and vacuum. Physics currently has a mixture of classical,…