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I provide a critical commentary regarding the attitude of the logician and the philosopher towards the physicist and physics. The commentary is intended to showcase how a general change in attitude towards making scientific inquiries can be…
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…
The nature of time has beguiled philosophers for nearly three millennia. There are myriad types of time including cosmological time, biological time, psychological time, physical time, historical time, and even theological time. My brief…
Albert Einstein's practice in physics and his philosophical positions gradually reoriented themselves from more empiricist towards rationalist viewpoints. This change accompanied his turn towards unified field theory and different…
This paper summarizes and re-evaluates Prigogine's evolution of thought, from a more classical view of thermodynamics with negative implications for the evolution and persistence of life, through to a far more general and open formulation…
Einstein's distinction between principle theories and constructive theories is methodological rather than metaphysical. Principle theories such as thermodynamics and relativity articulate empirically distilled constraints that delimit…
Contrary to claims about the irrelevance of philosophy for science, I argue that philosophy has had, and still has, far more influence on physics than is commonly assumed. I maintain that the current anti-philosophical ideology has had…
Feyerabend frequently discussed physics. He also referred to the history of the subject when motivating his philosophy of science. Alas, as some examples show, his understanding of physics remained superficial. In this respect, Feyerabend…
As a neuroscientist and a theoretical physicist, both working on time, we have decided to open a direct dialogue to examine if the apparent discrepancies regarding the nature of time can be composed.
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…
In contemporary physics space and time are intertwined entities so that kinematical and dynamical quantities are expressed in the four-dimensional space-time. This formulation seems to contradict our every-day experience and perception…
In this essay we describe a platonic metaphysics where time is a fundamental idea such that the passage of time is independent of observers and the laws of physics. Furthermore, time serves to distinguish between a real and an abstract…
Two people may claim both to be naturalists, but have divergent conceptions of basic elements of the natural world which lead them to mean different things when they talk about laws of nature, or states, or the role of mathematics in…
The paper defends the thesis that it's possible to maintain some conceptual preconditions of overcoming of relativistic intentions in modern philosophy of science ("there are no any general foundations in philosophy of science"). We found…
Though the majority of physicists would probably not support preemptive wars, nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction would not exist without their contributions. Einstein's anti-militaristic position has been well-documented and the…
What is a physical theory? Although this intriguing question has been addressed from many different perspectives, some physicists and philosophers of physics have implicitly or explicitly embraced a philosophically-neutral definition of a…
Randomness is an unavoidable notion in discussing quantum physics, and this may trigger the curiosity to know more of its cultural history. This text is an invitation to explore the position on the matter of Thomas Aquinas, one of the most…
I argue for a four dimensional, non-dynamical view of space-time, where becoming is not an intrinsic property of reality. This view has many features in common with the Parmenidean conception of the universe. I discuss some recent…
The notions of time in the theories of Newton and Einstein are reviewed so that certain of their assumptions are clarified. These assumptions will be seen as the causes of the incompatibility between the two different ways of understanding…
I present a discussion of some open issues in the philosophy of space-time theories. Emphasis is put on the ontological nature of space and time, the relation between determinism and predictability, the origin of irreversible processes in…