Related papers: Feyerabend and physics
No, but the paper argues that Bohr understood his correspondence principle, or at least an aspect of that principle expressed by the notion of rational generalization, as grounded in Hankel's principle of permanence, adapted to new…
In the 60s of the last century the few courses of History of physics in Physics degree were held by scholars who, apart from a few exceptions, did not have a specific research background in the field. Some activities, books, social…
High energy physics features many ingenious tools for extracting finite results from formally divergent expressions. This brief note argues from a new perspective that all such formal infinities are meaningful markers of new physics. As…
The nature of the existence, revealed through Human cognitive system, has been evolving since the development of the languages. Part of such revelations were the geometrical forms and the numbers, whose beauty and order, wondrous and…
In a recent preprint [1] Jeffrey Bub presents a discussion of neo-Bohrian interpretations of quantum mechanics, and also of von Neumann's work on infinite tensor products [2]. He rightfully writes that this work provides a theoretical…
The purpose of this project is to outline various philosophies on the metaphysics of mathematics that have been prominent since the time of Cantor, highlighting some biographical aspects that have influenced these ideas as well. The main…
All our statements about the physical world are expressed in terms of everyday notions and thus in terms of classical physics. This necessity is behind each of our attempt to extract meaning out of empirical data and to communicate this…
Taking Heisenberg's and Schrodinger's theories of quantum mechanics as his case study, De Regt's contextual theory of understanding argues that recognizing qualitatively characteristic consequences of a theory T without performing exact…
Here we review a kind of post-World-War-II "Nachtrag" to H. Weyl's philosophical comments on mathematics and the natural sciences published in the middle of the 1920s. In a talk given at Z\"urich in the late 1940s, Weyl discussed…
In different passages of his dialogues, Plato showed deep mathematically-based physical insights. Regrettably most readers overlooked the respective statements, or they utterly did not understand those hints since they were full of…
Experiment plays a decisive role in physics. It is the single source of our understanding of nature. But, during the last century the main accent in theoretical physics has moved toward metaphysics. Some mathematicians/theoreticians try to…
Quantum complementarity is a fundamental feature of quantum systems and has captivated the physics research community for nearly a century, with significant advancements emerging in recent decades. This review traces the historical…
Inspired by philosophical ideas of Boltzmann, which are briefly recalled, we provide strong support for the possibility and convenience of a realistic world picture, properly nuanced. The arguments have consequences for the interpretation…
"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 concept of {\em complexity} (as a quantity) has been plagued by numerous contradictory and confusing definitions. By explicitly recognising a role for the observer of a system, an observer that attaches meaning to data about the system,…
Despite the success of our best models in Theoretical Physics, especially concerning Cosmology and Particle Physics, we still face persistent challenges. Among them we have the cosmological singularity problem, understanding the late-time…
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…
The procedure used to "do physics" in the macroscopic world is familiar: You take an object, start it off with a particular position and velocity, subject it to known forces (say gravity or friction, or both), and follow its trajectory. You…
The need for revolution in modern physics is a well known and often broached subject, however, the precision and success of current models narrows the possible changes to such a great degree that there appears to be no major change…
The major conceptual difficulties of quantum mechanics are analyzed. They are: the notion "wave-particle", the probabilistic interpretation of the Schroedinger wave \psi-function and hence the probability amplitude and its phase, long-range…