Related papers: The Concept of Fact in German Physics around 1900:…
This history of the concept of fact reveals that the fact-oriented practices of German physicists and historians derived from common origins. The concept of fact became part of the German language remarkably late. It gained momentum only…
Einstein regarded as one of the triumphs of his 1915 theory of gravity --- the general theory of relativity --- that it vindicated the action--reaction principle, while Newtonian mechanics as well as his 1905 special theory of relativity…
Einstein was highly fascinated by Ernest Mach's work and by formulating the general theory of relativity (GR) he tried to provide a mathematical description to the Mach's principle. However, soon after its formulation, it was realized that…
With his General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein produced a revolution in our conception of reality and of the knowledge we can obtain from it. This revolution can be viewed from philosophy as leading to one of the great paradigms in…
This is a brief look at how Einstein explored formal symmetries between quantized matter and quantized radiation between 1903 and 1925. Specifically he employed thermodynamic comparisons between the ideal molecular gas and the photon gas.…
Einstein's theoretical analysis of mass-energy equivalence, already, at the time, experimentally evident in radioactive decays, in two papers published in 1905, as well as Planck's introduction, in 1906, of the concepts of relativistic…
It is known that Einstein's conceptual base for his theory of relativity was the philosophy formulated by Immanuel Kant. Things appear differently to observers in different frames. However, Kant's Ding-an-Sich leads to the existence of the…
From its very beginning, Quantum Theory developed contrary to the intentions of its creators. For Max Planck it marks the failure of a long-term research program, in which he tried to understand the 2nd law of thermodynamics…
Since its inception, quantum theory has been the subject of fierce interpretive controversy, which persists to this day. Disputed topics include the basic ontology and dynamics of the theory, the role (if any) of measurement, the meaning of…
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,…
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…
The notions of time in the theories of Newton and Einstein are reviewed so that certain of their assumptions are clarified. These assumptions will be seen as the causes of the incompatibility between the two different ways of understanding…
Quantum mechanics is a fundamentally probabilistic theory (at least so far as the empirical predictions are concerned). It follows that, if one wants to properly understand quantum mechanics, it is essential to clearly understand the…
There are two broad opposing classes of attitudes to reality (realist vs idealist, material vs mental) with corresponding attitudes to knowledge (objective vs subjective, scientific vs romantic). I argue that these attitudes can be…
Einstein's happiest thought was his leap from the observation that a falling person feels no gravity to the realization that gravity might be equivalent to acceleration. It affects all bodies in the same way because it is a property of…
We recount the successful long career of classical physics, from Newton to Einstein, which was based on the philosophy of scientific realism. Special emphasis is given to the changing status and number of ontological entitities and…
Einstein's philosophy of physics (as clarified by Fine, Howard, and Held) was predicated on his Trennungsprinzip, a combination of separability and locality, without which he believed objectification, and thereby "physical thought" and…
In glaring contrast to its indisputable century-old experimental success, the ultimate objects and meaning of quantum physics remain a matter of vigorous debate among physicists and philosophers of science. This article attempts to shed new…
The information-theoretic point of view proposed by Leibniz in 1686 and developed by algorithmic information theory (AIT) suggests that mathematics and physics are not that different. This will be a first-person account of some doubts and…
In this paper, we discuss the role of Mathematics in articulating reality in theoretical Physics. We propose a parallel between empirical and theoretical work and investigate how scientists can also speak about reality without performing…