Related papers: What does it mean to "make sense" of physics?
What is physics? What are the limits of what physics can say about the world? In seeking ever-broader theoretical `umbrellas' for physical phenomena, we are seeking unifying principles. Emergent phenomena have turned out to be some of the…
Recent developments in foundations of physics have given rise to a class of views suggesting that physically meaningful descriptions must always be relativized to a physical perspective. In this article I distinguish between strong physical…
Even though the concepts of time and space are basic concepts of physics, they have not been vouchsafed a constructive definition. As to space, this is no wonder because a correct notion of space cannot be formed in the frame of the…
Epistemic interpretations of quantum mechanics fail to address the puzzle posed by the occurrence of probabilities in a fundamental physical theory. This is a puzzle about the physical world, not a puzzle about our relation to the physical…
There exist dozens of interpretations of quantum theory, but they do not seem to contribute much to understanding the theory. This paper attempts to clarify some issues that are discussed in those interpretations. The main keywords are:…
Can we train a machine to detect if another machine has understood a concept? In principle, this is possible by conducting tests on the subject of that concept. However we want this procedure to be done by avoiding direct questions. In…
Physical superpositions exist both in classical and in quantum physics. However, what is exactly meant by 'superposition' in each case is extremely different. In this paper we discuss some of the multiple interpretations which exist in the…
As far as algorithmic thinking is bound by symbolic paper-and-pencil operations, the Church-Turing thesis appears to hold. But is physics, and even more so, is the human mind, bound by symbolic paper-and-pencil operations? What about the…
An attempt is made to sort out ambiguities existing in the current usage of several basic concepts describing hard collisions of photons. It is argued that appropriate terminology is often a prerequisite for correct physics.
To explain consciousness as a physical process we must acknowledge the role of energy in the brain. Energetic activity is fundamental to all physical processes and causally drives biological behaviour. Recent neuroscientific evidence can be…
The aim of this essay is to propose a conception of mathematics that is fully consonant with naturalism. By that I mean the hypothesis that everything that exists is part of the natural world, which makes up a unitary whole.
Increasingly, the physics community is attending to issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion, both in language and action. We are more publicly recognizing our individual responsibilities as physicists to address social injustice and…
We suggest a contextual realist interpretation of relational quantum mechanics. The principal point is a correct understanding of the concept of reality and taking into account the categorical distinction between the ideal and the real.…
It has for ages been a rather constant feature of thinking in science to take it for granted that the respective thinking happens in realms which are totally outside and independent of all the other phenomena that constitute the objects of…
Defining interdisciplinary physics today requires first a reformulation of what is physics today, which in turn calls for clarifying what makes a physicist. This assessment results from my forty year journey arguing and fighting to build…
Learning to think like a physicist (LTP) is often cited as a central goal of graduate physics education, yet what this means in practice and the extent to which physics graduate education prepares students to develop LTP and view LTP as…
In order to design strong paradigms for isolating lexical access and semantics, we need to know what a word is. Surprisingly few linguists and philosophers have a clear model of what a word is, even though words impact basically every…
While its applications have made quantum theory arguably the most successful theory in physics, its interpretation continues to be the subject of lively debate within the community of physicists and philosophers concerned with conceptual…
A century after the discovery of quantum mechanics, the meaning of quantum mechanics still remains elusive. This is largely due to the puzzling nature of the wave function, the central object in quantum mechanics. If we are realists about…
Mathematics can serve many functions in physics. It can provide a computational system, reflect a physical idea, conveniently encode a rule, and so forth. A physics student thus has many different options for using mathematics in his…