Related papers: What happened to modern physics?
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…
Theory of Relativity (Special and General) is one of the most influential theories of the 20th century and has changed the way we view the world. It is part of many undergraduate curriculums and it is often suggested that it should be…
Quantum theory has been proved as an outstanding mystery in modern science. The predictions of science have turned out to be probabilistic. The principle of determinism has failed. For systems like weather, earthquakes, rolling dices etc...…
The most dramatic developments in theoretical physics in the next millennium are likely to come when we make progress on so far unresolved foundational questions. In this essay I consider two of the deepest problems confronting us, the…
Special relativity is no longer a new revolutionary theory but a firmly established cornerstone of modern physics. The teaching of special relativity, however, still follows its presentation as it unfolded historically, trying to convince…
Classical physics has enabled the acquisition of significant knowledge of the physical properties of nature on a standard macroscopic scale. These achievements were driven by use of the causal ontological approach (proposed originally by…
Quantum Mechanics, the physical theory describing the microworld, represents one of science's greatest triumphs. It lies at the root of all modern digital technologies and offers unparalleled correspondence between prediction and…
Without a doubt many problems in physics arise as a consequence of our philosophical conception of the world. In this contribution however we endeavor to alleviate this scenario by putting forward a philosophical approach under which some…
With the two most profound conceptual revolutions of XXth century physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, which have culminated into relativistic spacetime geometry and quantum gauge field theory as the principles for gravity and the…
The tremendous popular success of Chaos Theory shares some common points with the not less fortunate Relativity: they both rely on a misunderstanding. Indeed, ironically , the scientific meaning of these terms for mathematicians and…
As quantum theory celebrates its 100th birthday, spectacular successes are mixed with outstanding puzzles and promises of new technologies. This article reviews both the successes of quantum theory and the ongoing debate about its…
Quantum theory can be understood as pointing to an ontology of relations. I observe that this reading of quantum mechanics is supported by the ubiquity of relationality in contemporary fundamental physics, including in classical mechanics,…
Since its inception at the beginning of the twentieth century, quantum mechanics has challenged our conceptions of how the universe ought to work; however, the equations of quantum mechanics can be too computationally difficult to solve…
Quantum field theory has formed the conceptual framework of most of physics for more than sixty years. It incorporates a complete revision of our conception of the nature of matter and existence itself. Yet it is rarely taught, or even…
We still lack any consensus about what one is actually talking about as one uses quantum mechanics. There is a gap between the abstract terms in which the theory is couched and the phenomena the theory enables each of us to account for so…
Quantum Mechanics, almost 80 years after its arrival, is a well established and experimentally not falsified theory. It has predicted and explained a whole series of natural phenomena of a very delicate nature. But its interpretation has…
At this beginning of the 21st century, the situation of physics is not without analogy with that which prevailed a hundred years ago, with the outset of the double scientific revolution of relativity and quanta. On the one hand, recent…
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…
Our understanding of the four basic concepts of Physics -- space, time, matter and force -- has undergone radical change in the course of work on unification, starting with Maxwell's unification of electricity with magnetism, all the way to…
As a basis for epistemological study of ``time,'' we analyze three suspect phenomena introduced by modern physics: non-locality, asymmetric aging and advanced interaction. It is shown that all three arise in connection with what has to be…