Related papers: Physicists in times of war
Recent decades have seen a rise in the use of physics methods to study different societal phenomena. This development has been due to physicists venturing outside of their traditional domains of interest, but also due to scientists from…
For more than half a century, dualities have been at the heart of modern physics. From quantum mechanics to statistical mechanics, condensed matter physics, quantum field theory and quantum gravity, dualities have proven useful in solving…
In the book The Essential Tension Thomas Kuhn described the conflict between tradition and innovation in scientific research --i.e., the desire to explore new promising areas, counterposed to the need to capitalize on the work done in 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…
While its applications have made quantum theory arguably the most successful theory in physics, its interpretation continues to be the subject of lively debate within the community of physicists and philosophers concerned with conceptual…
It is a widespread belief that results like G\"odel's incompleteness theorems or the intrinsic randomness of quantum mechanics represent fundamental limitations to humanity's strive for scientific knowledge. As the argument goes, there are…
We discuss the problems of consensus and unity in science. The natural sciences seem to contrast with many other areas of endeavor in that a high level of consensus seems to exist in them. However, a careful analysis of the structure of…
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…
Some authors in the quantum gravity community endorse, explicitly or implicitly, a radical relationalist view of time which states that the ordinal structure of time is not needed even in our classical theories, especially in general…
Contents: 1. Prologomena to any meta future physics 1.1 Physics needs for building future accelerators 1.2 Physics needs for funding future accelerators 2. Physics questions for future accelerators 2.1 Crimes and misapprehensions 2.1.1…
It is commonly remarked that contemporary physics faces a challenge in reconciling quantum theory with Relativity, specifically General Relativity as a theory of gravity. But "challenge" is too mild a descriptor. Once one understands both…
There are countless examples in the history of science that not only were the laws of physics often incomplete and more limited in their domain of validity than was realized, but at times they missed the mark completely. Despite this, our…
This report is based on a series of papers written between 1980 and 2005 on the origin of Iraq's nuclear weapons program, which was known to one of the authors in the late 1970s already, as well as to a number of other physicists, who…
In a brief article [1], Seife refers to works by Einstein and Schroedinger and concludes that there is a relentless murmur of confusion underneath the chorus of praise for quantum theory. It is noteworthy that a "murmur" is not necessarily…
What is sometimes called the "totalitarian principle," a metaphysical doctrine often associated with the famous physicist Murray Gell-Mann, states that everything allowed by the laws of nature must actually exist. The principle is closely…
I try to clarify several confusions in the popular literature concerning chaos, determinism, the arrow of time, entropy and the role of probability in physics. Classical ideas going back to Laplace and Boltzmann are explained and defended…
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…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
A vast body of literature addresses the complex nature of science's reproducibility crisis. In contrast with this perceived complexity, some recent papers from the discipline of physics suggests that irreproducibility does not point to a…
By 1930, at a time when the new physics based on relativity and quantum theory had reached a state of consolidation, problems of a foundational kind began to abound. Physicists began to speak of a new "crisis" and envisage a forthcoming…