Related papers: Classical Thought in Newton's General Scholium
In his essay "Nature Conformable to Herself" the late Murray Gell-Mann expands on an observation of Newton that theories of seemingly disparate phenomena in the universe often make use of similar ideas and similar mathematical structure.…
Since I first became enthralled with physics as a teenager, I've been intrigued by the philosophical aspects of the discipline. As I approached the end of my career as an experimental physicist and observational astronomer (I'm now…
Niels Bohr's doctrine of the primacy of "classical concepts" is arguably his most criticized and misunderstood view. We present a new, careful historical analysis that makes clear that Bohr's doctrine was primarily an epistemological…
Part 1 : For more than two millennia, ever since Euclid's geometry, the so called Archimedean Axiom has been accepted without sufficiently explicit awareness of that fact. The effect has been a severe restriction of our views of space-time,…
Scottish mathematician Colin MacLaurin (1698-1746) is best known for his A Treatise of Fluxions (1742), An Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries (1748), and the appellation for a type of power series. However, it is hardly…
It is known that Sir Isaac Newton suggested a date for the Passion of Christ in the posthumously published "Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John" (1733). What was not known is that the first attempts to…
Newton set the stage for our view of how science should be done. We remain in what I will call the `Newtonian Paradigm' in all of physics, including Newton, Einstein, and Schrodinger. As I will show shortly, Newton invented and bequeathed…
Euclid pioneered the concept of a mathematical theory developed from axioms by a series of justified proof steps. From the outset there were critics and improvers. In this century the use of computers to check proofs for correctness sets a…
Despite the extraordinary successes the two great bastions of $20^{th}$ century science (Quantum Theory and General Relativity) are troubled with serious conceptual and mathematical difficulties. As a result, further growth of fundamental…
An origin is often an intriguing issue. It becomes doubly intriguing when the logical form of thinking is considered. In this paper we will investigate exactly that: we will conjecture on the origin of basic instruments of logical thinking.…
The philosopher Plato is remembered even today by scientists, and his writings are still inspiring the scientific research. In the present short note (intended essentially for public outreach) two examples are briefly illustrated: 1) the…
Scientific progress is inherently sequential: collective knowledge is updated as new studies enter the literature. We propose the sequential meta-analysis research trace (SMART), which quantifies the influence of each study at the time it…
A simple toy model is proposed that would allow conscious perceptions to be either classical (perceptions of objects without large quantum uncertainties or variances) or highly quantum (e.g., having large variances in the perceived position…
Traditional cognitive science rests on a foundation of classical logic and probability theory. This foundation has been seriously challenged by several findings in experimental psychology on human decision making. Meanwhile, the formalism…
The purpose of this article is to provide a novel approach and justification of the idea that classical physics and quantum physics can neither function nor even be conceived one without the other - in line with ideas attributed to e.g.…
We offer a view of mathematics as an experimental science where axioms play the role of foundational theories like general relativity and quantum mechanics in physics. Under this view, axioms are provisional and inferred from experience…
The aim of this work is to show how Einstein's quantum hypothesis leads immediately and necessarily to a departure from classical mechanics. First we note that the classical description and predictions are in terms of idealized measurements…
This paper presents yet another personal reflection on one the most important concepts in both science and the humanities: time. This elusive notion has been not only bothering philosophers since Plato and Aristotle. It goes throughout…
The question of cosmic beginning has always attracted considerable attention from serious thinkers past and present. This article examines Ibn Sina's proposed solution to the vexed problem that given an eternally existing world and one…
In this paper of "The Epistemology of Contemporary Physics" series we investigate the epistemological significance and sensibility (and hence interpretability and interpretation) of classical mechanics in its Newtonian and non-Newtonian…