Related papers: Zeno, the philologists, and the scientists
Conceptual problems regarding the arrow of time in classical physics, quantum physics, cosmology, and quantum gravity are discussed. Particular attention is paid to the dynamical role of the quantum indeterminism, and to various concepts of…
In the present essay we attempt to reconstruct Newtonian mechanics under the guidance of logical principles and of a constructive approach related to the genetic epistemology of J. Piaget and R. Garc\'ia \citep{piag89}. Instead of…
Assuming basic familiarity with neutrino physics, I give a telegraphic and panoramic view of the current status and the main open challenges in the field. I also illustrate how the mechanism responsible for neutrino mass generation may shed…
In this brief report, we present a proposal to observe the classical zeno effect via the frequent measurement in optics.
Did the universe have a beginning or does it exist forever, i.e. is it eternal at least in relation to the past? This fundamental question was a main topic in ancient philosophy of nature and the Middle Ages. Philosophically it was more or…
Most scientists would hold that science has not established that the cosmos is physically comprehensible - i.e. such that there is some as-yet undiscovered true physical theory of everything that is unified. This is an empirically…
It has been shown at other occasions that recent results of modern physics can be used to shed some more light onto the foundations of the world, provided the actual task of philosophy is being re-interpreted in terms of a theory which is…
Notions of unknown truths and unknowable truths are important in formal epistemology, which are related to each other in e.g. Fitch's paradox of knowability. Although there have been some logical research on the notion of unknown truths and…
The discoveries and open questions in neutrino physics, as reported at Neutrino 2002 and more recently, are reviewed from a theoretical perspective.
Axiom pinpointing refers to the task of finding the specific axioms in an ontology which are responsible for a consequence to follow. This task has been studied, under different names, in many research areas, leading to a reformulation and…
We present a system of axioms motivated by a topological intuition: The set of subsets of any set is a topology on that set. On the one hand, this system is a common weakening of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory ZF, the positive set theory GPK…
The aim of this work is to provide a possible philosophical motivation to the variational principles of physics in general and a possible way to unify the axiomatizations of mechanics theories. The leitmotif of this work is a dialectical…
Gravity plays an important part in the experiments and discoveries of the modern world. But how was it discovered? Surely Newton and Einstein were not the only people to observe it and account for it. It had been a long path before the full…
Aristotle is generally accepted as the father of logic. The ideas that he raised in his study of logical reasoning carried the development of science over the centuries. Today, in the era of AI, this title of the fatherhood of logic has a…
The quantum Zeno effect arises due to frequent observation. That implies the existence of some experimenter and its interaction with the system. In this contribution, we examine what happens for a closed system if one considers a quantum…
Our understanding about things is conceptual. By stating that we reason about objects, it is in fact not the objects but concepts referring to them that we manipulate. Now, so long just as we acknowledge infinitely extending notions such as…
When a mountaineer is ascending one of the great peaks of the Himalayas she knows that an entirely new vista awaits her at the top, whose ramifications will be known only after she gets there. Her immediate goal though, is to tackle the…
This is an introduction to the set-theoretic method of forcing, including its application in proving the independence of the Continuum Hypothesis from the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms of set theory. I presuppose no particular mathematical…
This is a systematic review of the concept of indistinguishability in both classical and quantum mechanics, with particular attention to Gibbs' paradox. Section 1 is on the Gibbs paradox; section 2 is a defense of the concept of classical…
Scientists often think of the world (or some part of it) as a dynamical system, a stochastic process, or a generalization of such a system. Prominent examples of systems are (i) the system of planets orbiting the sun or any other classical…