Related papers: The physicists philosophy of physics
Philosophers frequently struggle with the relation of metaphysics to the everyday world, with its practical value, and with its relation to empirical science. This paper distinguishes several different models of the relation between…
Social physics is an active and diverse field in which many scientists with formal training in physics study a broad class of complex social phenomena. Social physics investigates societal problems but most often does not count on the…
We discuss the fundamental principles underlying the current physical theories and the prospects of further improving their knowledge through experiments in space.
Measurements play a crucial role in doing physics: Their results provide the basis on which we adopt or reject physical theories. In this note, we examine the effect of subjecting measurements themselves to our experience. We require that…
The process of doing Science in condition of uncertainty is illustrated with a toy experiment in which the inferential and the forecasting aspects are both present. The fundamental aspects of probabilistic reasoning, also relevant in real…
The status of the sociophysics is discussed as placed between the physics and the sociology. In particular we ask if the second law of thermodynamics can be useful in social sciences.
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…
We discuss the nature and a general formulation of the relativity principle and we show that it can be justified starting from a strictly operational point of view. We give some remark on the connection with the spacetime symmetry groups.…
We investigate the physics of quantum reference frames. Specifically, we study several simple scenarios involving a small number of quantum particles, whereby we promote one of these particles to the role of a quantum observer and ask what…
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 has been a recent resurgence in the area of explainable artificial intelligence as researchers and practitioners seek to make their algorithms more understandable. Much of this research is focused on explicitly explaining decisions or…
In recent years, a series of high-profile retractions and fraud cases have arisen in physics, sparking a conversation about research integrity and replicability. Here, we discuss how the practice of science is shaped by the social and…
Metaphysics is the science of being and asks the question ``What really exists?'' The answer to this question has been sought for by mankind since the beginning of recorded time. In the past 2500 years there have been many answers to this…
Quantum mechanics, one of the most successful theories in the history of science, was created to account for physical systems not describable by classical physics. Though it is consistent with all experiments conducted thus far, many of its…
What do we do when cosmology raises questions it cannot answer? These include the existence of a multiverse and the universality of the laws of physics. We cannot settle any of these issues by experiment, and this is where philosophers…
"So what do you do? I mean, what do you actually do?" This is one of the most common questions one theoretical physicist receives from her students, and is representative of a common curiosity among aspiring physicists. Students often…
This work formulates and gives grounds for general principles and theorems that question the energy function doctrine and its quantum version as a genuine law of nature without borders of adequacy. The emphasis is on the domain where the…
More than a speculative technology, quantum computing seems to challenge our most basic intuitions about how the physical world should behave. In this thesis I show that, while some intuitions from classical computer science must be…
As part of a longitudinal study into identity development in upper-level physics students, a phenomenographic research method was used to examine students' perceptions of what it means to be a physicist. The results revealed four different…
The beliefs of physicists can bias their results towards their expectations in a number of ways. We survey a variety of historical cases of expectation bias in observations, experiments, and calculations.