Related papers: On Dualities and Equivalences Between Physical The…
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…
Duality symmetries in supergravity theories, together with their implications for string theory, are reviewed.
The theory of regularity is a philosophical perspective in which laws of nature are just descriptions, that is to say, laws of nature do not govern the world. Moreover, according to the theory of regularity, the number of laws of nature…
The problematic relationship between science and philosophy has, since the beginning of modernity, divided the world into two separate domains: nature and human. Some of today's schools of philosophy and epistemological inquiry have…
This is an essay in what might be called ``mathematical metaphysics.'' There is a fundamental duality that run through mathematics and the natural sciences. The duality starts as the logical level; it is represented by the Boolean logic of…
The concepts of complementarity and entanglement are considered with respect to their significance in and beyond physics. A formally generalized, weak version of quantum theory, more general than ordinary quantum theory of material systems,…
String theory and supersymmetry are theoretical ideas that go beyond the standard model of particle physics and show promise for unifying all forces. After a brief introduction to supersymmetry, we discuss the prospects for its experimental…
What is a physical theory? Although this intriguing question has been addressed from many different perspectives, some physicists and philosophers of physics have implicitly or explicitly embraced a philosophically-neutral definition of a…
In general terms duality consists of two descriptions of one physical system by using degrees of freedom of different nature. There are different kinds of dualities and they have been extremely useful to uncover the underlying strong…
Gauge theory, which is the basis of all particle physics, is itself based on a few fundamental concepts, the consequences of which are often as beautiful as they are deep. In this short lecture course I shall try to give an introduction to…
The theory of probability and the quantum theory, the one mathematical and the other physical, are related in that each admits a number of very different interpretations. It has been proposed that the conceptual problems of the quantum…
The strong coupling limit of a quantum system is in general quite complicated, but in some cases a great simplification occurs: the strongly coupled limit is equivalent to the weakly coupled limit of some other system. In string theory…
Farkas established that a system of linear inequalities has a solution if and only if we cannot obtain a contradiction by taking a linear combination of the inequalities. We state and formally prove several Farkas-like theorems over…
Although the wish to unify theories into something more fundamental is omnipresent and compelling, nonetheless, in a sense, theories must first be unifiable. The reasons for the success of the unification of electricity and magnetism into a…
Almost all theories of physics have expressed physical laws by means of differential equations. One can ask: why differential equations? What is special about them? This article addresses these questions and is presented as an inquiry-based…
The standard notion of formal theory, in Logic, is in general biased exclusively towards assertion: it commonly refers only to collections of assertions that any agent who accepts the generating axioms of the theory should also be committed…
This thesis discusses various aspects of duality in quantum field theory and string theory. In the first part we consider duality in topological quantum field theories, concentrating on the Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten theories as (dual)…
We acuminate the idea of a final theory of physics in order to analyze its logical implications and consequences. It is argued that the rationale of a final theory is the principle of sufficient reason. This implies that a final theory of…
The relationship between mathematics and physics has long been an area of interest and speculation. Subscribing to the recent definition by Tegmark, we present a mathematical structure involving the only division rings - the real,…
This is a general introduction to duality in field theories. The existence and breaking of global symmetries is used as a guideline to systematically prove duality between different field theories. Systems discussed include abelian and…