Related papers: The game of metaphysics
The fact that no evidence of new physics was found so far by LHC experiments has led some to call for the abandonment of the naturalness criterion. Others, on the contrary, have felt the need to break a lance in its defense by claiming that…
What is the nature of reality? How should be an answer to this question? At this level, we are so deep that all our concepts are obscure. Quantum theory (QT) is at this level. The quest for interpreting it fails because the clarity of our…
Einstein initially objected to the probabilistic aspect of quantum mechanics - the idea that God is playing at dice. Later he changed his ground, and focussed instead on the point that the Copenhagen Interpretation leads to what Einstein…
We introduce an approach to the foundations of physics that is more in line with the foundations of mathematics. The idea is to examine current theories and find a set of starting physical assumptions that are sufficient to rederive them,…
A 21st century view of the nature of science is presented. It attempts to show how a consistent description of science and scientific progress can be given. Science advances through a sequence of models with progressively greater predictive…
A tradition handed down among physicists maintains that classical physics is a perfectly deterministic theory capable of predicting the future with absolute certainty, independently of any interpretations. It also tells that it was quantum…
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…
I distinguish two senses in which one can take a given physical theory to be `complete'. On the first, a complete physical theory is one that, in principle, completely describes physical reality. On the second, a complete physical theory is…
Modern fundamental physics poses new questions for philosophy, which, as it seems to us, have not yet received appropriate attention from philosophers of science. This paper formulates a number of such questions in order to present them to…
The philosophy of science is a discipline concerning the metaphysical aspect of science. Recently, I proposed measurement theory, which is characterized as the metaphysical and linguistic interpretation of quantum mechanics. I assert that…
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…
We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time…
We discuss the nature of reality in the ontological context of Penrose's math-matter-mind triangle. The triangle suggests the circularity of the widespread view that math arises from the mind, the mind arises out of matter, and that matter…
"All men by nature desire to know," states Aristotle in the famous first sentence of his Metaphysics. Knowledge about fundamental particles and interactions, that is, knowledge about the deepest aspects of matter, is certainly high if not…
The claim of the freedom of the will (understood as an individual who is transcendent to Nature) in the name of XXth century scientific knowledge, against the perspective of XVIIIth-XIXth century scientific materialism, is analysed and…
Most physics theories are deterministic, with the notable exception of quantum mechanics which, however, comes plagued by the so-called measurement problem. This state of affairs might well be due to the inability of standard mathematics to…
This paper argues for the following three theses: (1) There is a clear reason to prefer physical theories with deterministic dynamical equations: such theories are maximally rich in information and usually also maximally simple. (2) There…
The implications of the physical theory of quantum mechanics on the question of realism is much a subject of sustaining interest, while the background questions among physicists on how to think about all the theoretical notion and…
We argue about a conceptual approach to quantum formalism. Starting from philosophical conjectures (Platonism, Idealism and Realism) as basic ontic elements (namely: math world, data world, and state of matter), we will analyze the quantum…
I reflect on some of the basic aspects of present day Beyond the Standard Model particle physics, focusing mostly on the issues of naturalness, in particular on the so-called hierarchy problem. To all of us, physics as natural science…