Related papers: An Ahistorical Approach to Elementary Physics
Why is modern physics still today, more than 100 years after its birth, the privilege of an elite of scientists and unknown for the great majority of citizens? The answer is simple, since modern physics is in general not present in the…
A physical theory is proposed that obeys both the principles of special relativity and of quantum mechanics. As a key feature, the laws are formulated in terms of quantum events rather than of particle states. Temporal and spatial…
This paper forms part of a wider campaign: to deny pointillisme. That is the doctrine that a physical theory's fundamental quantities are defined at points of space or of spacetime, and represent intrinsic properties of such points or…
Since ancient times, mathematics has proven unreasonably effective in its description of physical phenomena. As humankind enters a period of advancement where the completion of the much coveted theory of quantum gravity is at hand, there is…
A suitable unified statistical formulation of quantum and classical mechanics in a *-algebraic setting leads us to conclude that information itself is noncommutative in quantum mechanics. Specifically we refer here to an observer's…
Being mathematics a natural language to Mankind and to physics, it must be constantly adapted to our necessities and our natural perception. Then, mathematical concepts are not absolute to reality. Although mathematical theories are…
We suggest a somewhat non-standard view on a set of curious, paradoxical from the standpoint of simple classical physics and everyday experience phenomena. There are the quantisation (discrete set of values) of the observables (e.g.,…
We present a self-contained introduction to the classical theory of spacetime and fields. This exposition is based on the most general principles: the principle of general covariance (relativity) and the principle of least action. The order…
Quantum mechanics can seem like a departure from everyday experience of the physical world, but constructivist theories assert that learners build new ideas from their existing ones. To explore how students can navigate this tension, we…
The purpose of the dynamics of moving systems is to search for the mathematical model that describes the link between the resultant applied force, that is the cause, and the speed of system that is the effect. This mathematical link…
From antiquity the conceptual perception of space changed painfully and at a relatively slow pace. It went through mythological descriptions, religious beliefs, metaphysical worldviews and cosmological models with a mechanistic structure,…
The ontology proposed in this paper is aimed at demonstrating that it is possible to understand the counter-intuitive predictions of quantum mechanics while still retaining much of the framework underlying classical physics, the implication…
Starting from the guiding principles of spacetime locality and operationalism, a general framework for a probabilistic description of nature is proposed. Crucially, no notion of time or metric is assumed, neither any specific physical…
Although time is one of our most intuitive physical concepts, its understanding at the fundamental level is still an open question in physics. For instance, time in quantum mechanics and general relativity are two distinct and incompatible…
Social physics is the application of ideas, concepts and tools from physics to study social phenomena. In this article, we present a mechanical theory underlying a mathematical treatment of social physics. We explore the possibility of…
The purpose of physics is to describe nature from elementary particles all the way up to cosmological objects like cluster of galaxies and black holes. Although a unified description for all this spectrum of events is desirable, this would…
A version of the quantum theory of gravity based on the concept of the wave functional of the universe is proposed. To determine the physical wave functional, the quantum principle of least action is formulated as a secular equation for the…
I contrast two possible attitudes towards a given branch of physics: as inferential (i.e., as concerned with an agent's ability to make predictions given finite information), and as dynamical (i.e., as concerned with the dynamical equations…
The axiomatic definition of mass in classical mechanics, outlined by Mach in the second half of 19th century and improved by several authors, is simplified and extended to the theory of special relativity. According to the extended…
The paper pursues two aims. First, to revisit the classical electromagnetic mass theory and develop it further by making use of a corollary of general relativity - that the propagation of light in non-inertial reference frames is…