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Determinism is (roughly) the thesis that the past determines the future. But efforts to define it precisely have exposed deep methodological disagreements. Standard possible-worlds formulations of determinism presuppose an "agreement"…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2026-01-19 Hans Halvorson , JB Manchak , James Owen Weatherall

The main aim of this paper is to make a remark about the relation between (i) dualities between theories, as `duality' is understood in physics and (ii) equivalence of theories, as `equivalence' is understood in logic and philosophy. The…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2018-06-06 Jeremy Butterfield

While philosophy of science is the study of problems of knowledge concerning science in general, there also exists - or should exist - a '' philosophy in science'' directed at finding out in what ways our actual scientific knowledge may…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Bernard d'Espagnat

Many physical theories like chaos theory are fundamentally concerned with the conceptual tension between determinism and randomness. Kolmogorov complexity can express randomness in determinism and gives an approach to formulate chaotic…

Chaotic Dynamics · Physics 2007-05-23 Paul Vitanyi

In this short report the first attempt of a new approach to the still mysterious phenomenon of the life, and its peak, the human being, is presented from the view point of the natural sciences, i.e. of the physics in the broad sense of the…

General Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Boris Chirikov

Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…

Biological Physics · Physics 2024-01-23 William Bialek

The quantum-mechanical description of the world, including human observers, makes substantial use of entanglement. In order to understand this, we need to adopt concepts of truth, probability and time which are unfamiliar in modern…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2013-04-23 Anthony Sudbery

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…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2020-07-15 Goran Senjanovic

Free will discourse is primarily centred around the thesis of determinism. Much of the literature takes determinism as its starting premise, assuming it true for the sake of discussion, and then proceeds to present arguments for why, if…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2026-01-15 Henry D. Potter , George F. R. Ellis , Kevin J. Mitchell

A tradition handed down among physicists maintains that classical physics is a perfectly deterministic theory capable of predicting the future with absolute certainty, independently of any interpretations. It also tells that it was quantum…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2023-03-09 Flavio Del Santo

The representations of the world around in physics built with help of causality are analyzed and seems incomplete. The observer's causal representations form a closed logical system, i.e. the compact group related to cause-effect chains.…

General Physics · Physics 2010-11-02 A. V. Novikov-Borodin

The true dynamical randomness is obtained as a natural fundamental property of deterministic quantum systems. It provides quantum chaos passing to the classical dynamical chaos under the ordinary semiclassical transition, which extends the…

chao-dyn · Physics 2008-02-03 Andrei P. Kirilyuk

Information is everywhere in nature which is very uncertain and unpredictable. But information, in itself, is a very ambiguous term. In this cursory write-up, we attempt to understand the formal meaning of information by quantifying…

Classical Physics · Physics 2024-09-20 Sagar Chakraborty

We discuss the problems of consensus and unity in science. The natural sciences seem to contrast with many other areas of endeavor in that a high level of consensus seems to exist in them. However, a careful analysis of the structure of…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2011-11-01 David A. Edwards , Stephen Wilcox

The paper discusses the problem of demarcation between the dimensions of natural and the human sciences in contemporary cosmology. In spite of a common presumption that cosmology is a natural science, the specificity of its alleged subject…

General Physics · Physics 2011-02-16 Alexei V. Nesteruk

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…

Classical Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Petr Hajicek

The theories of quantum mechanics and relativity dramatically altered our understanding of the universe ushering in the era of modern physics. Quantum theory deals with objects probabilistically at small scales, whereas relativity deals…

General Physics · Physics 2021-04-13 John Skilling , Kevin H. Knuth

The dynamic instability of the living systems and the "superposition" of different forms of randomness are viewed as a component of the contingently increasing organization of life along evolution. We briefly survey how classical and…

Other Quantitative Biology · Quantitative Biology 2011-04-07 Marcello Buiatti , Giuseppe Longo

The way Leibniz applied his philosophy to mathematics has been the subject of longstanding debates. A key piece of evidence is his letter to Masson on bodies. We offer an interpretation of this often misunderstood text, dealing with the…

History and Overview · Mathematics 2021-12-16 Mikhail G. Katz , Karl Kuhlemann , David Sherry , Monica Ugaglia

Einstein initially objected to the probabilistic aspect of quantum mechanics - the idea that God is playing at dice. Later he changed his ground, and focussed instead on the point that the Copenhagen Interpretation leads to what Einstein…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2015-06-26 D. M. Appleby