相关论文: MELENCOLIA I: The physics of Albrecht Duerer
This is a brief introduction to the life and ideas of the Lithuanian-German physicist, philosopher and religious thinker Max B. Weinstein, who is today best known for his thoughts concerning so-called pandeism. An accomplished theoretical…
This article explores the overall geometric manner in which human beings make sense of the world around them by means of their physical theories; in particular, in what are nowadays called pregeometric pictures of Nature. In these, the…
This paper revisits the foundations of mathematical proof through the lens of Aristotle's threefold conception of truth: sensory evidence, axiomatic definition, and syllogistic deduction. I argue that modern mathematics has too often…
In attempting to derive irreversible macroscopic thermodynamics from reversible microscopic dynamics, Boltzmann inadvertently smuggled in a premise that assumed the very irreversibility he was trying to prove: 'molecular chaos.' The program…
Scholars of the history and philosophy of science have asked what would decolonized science would look like. This paper develops an answer by interrogating the assumption that observations need to be recorded and communicated using the…
Metaphysics is traditionally conceived as aiming at the truth -- indeed, the most fundamental truths about the most general features of reality. Philosophical naturalists, urging that philosophical claims be grounded on science, have often…
John Wheeler advocated the principle that information is the foundation of physics and asked us to reformulate physics in terms of bits. The goal is to consider what we know already and work out a new mathematical theory in which space,…
The quantum "mystery which cannot go away" (in Feynman's words) of wave-particle duality is illustrated in a striking way by Wheeler's delayed-choice GedankenExperiment. In this experiment, the configuration of a two-path interferometer is…
Both lectures focus on the first part of the so-called 'mathematical part' of Plato's Theaetetus. In this passage, the young Theaetetus briefly recounts the mathematical lesson given by the geometer Theodorus. The first lecture delves into…
Are symmetries discovered or rather invented by humans ? The stand you may take firmly here reveals a lot of your epistemological position. Conversely, the arguments you may forge for answering to this question, or to one of its numerous…
A pedagogical description of a simple ungeometrical approach to General Relativity is given, which follows the pattern of well understood field theories, such as electrodynamics. This leads quickly to most of the important weak field…
In this paper, I aim to clarify the unconscious ideologies and attitudes held by physicists through Prigogine's work. Prigogine was an outstanding chemist and physicist who made significant contributions to the development of…
We explore the different meanings of "quantum uncertainty" contained in Heisenberg's seminal paper from 1927, and also some of the precise definitions that were explored later. We recount the controversy about "Anschaulichkeit",…
A system's apparent simplicity depends on whether it is represented classically or quantally. This is not so surprising, as classical and quantum physics are descriptive frameworks built on different assumptions that capture, emphasize, and…
The purpose of this article is to provide a novel approach and justification of the idea that classical physics and quantum physics can neither function nor even be conceived one without the other - in line with ideas attributed to e.g.…
Hilbert's paper on ``The Foundations of Physics (First Communication),'' is now primarily known for its parallel publication of essentially the same gravitational field equations of general relativity which Einstein published in a note on…
This manuscript is written for students in introductory physics classes to address some of the common difficulties and misconceptions of the normal force, especially the relationship between normal and friction forces. Accordingly, it is…
The modern usage of the words astronomy and astrology is traced back to distinctions, largely ignored in recent scholarship. Three interpretations of celestial phenomena (in a geometric, a substantialist and a prognostic versions) coexisted…
The definition of negation has to be referred to the totality of a theory and at last to what is defined as the organization of a scientific theory; in other words, the definition of negation is of a structural kind, rather than of an…
As it is well known, classical mechanics consists of several basic features like determinism, reductionism, completeness of knowledge and mechanicism. In this article the basic assumptions are discussed which underlie those features. It is…