The physics tag has no wiki summary.
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1answer
86 views
Is time “Unreal”? [closed]
In 5th century BC Greece, Antiphon the Sophist, in a fragment
preserved from his chief work On Truth, held that: "Time is not a
reality (hypostasis), but a concept (noêma) or a measure ...
2
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2answers
123 views
What does Einstein's quote “If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts” mean?
What did Einstein really mean by saying:
If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.
5
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2answers
100 views
How would you describe the relationship of science and philosophy of science?
How would you describe the relationship of science and philosophy of science? Is it a worldview that sets a tone to scientific jargon? I mean that statements of eg. physics are under submission of the ...
5
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5answers
146 views
Can anything truly be simultaneous?
I was looking at a discussion about simultaneous causation and something that came up was that all physical processes take time. So nothing can truly be simultaneous.
And yet, we have philosophers ...
10
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1answer
156 views
Materialism and magnetism
Going by its Wikipedia page, materialism has been largely discredited due to advances in physics as it cannot explain phenomena such as gravity which apparently exist without the connivance of matter. ...
4
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4answers
215 views
Regarding platonism, and the absurd applicability of mathematics to physics
I am much interested in discussions such as Wigner's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". It's quite amazing that mathematics so well applies to our universe, and ...
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2answers
77 views
Does the Weak Anthropic Principle make certain assumptions about the nature of sentient biological organisms?
There are various forms of the Anthropic Principle, and the Weak Anthropic Principle in the version stated by Barrow and Tipler roughly says that the observed values of the physical and cosmological ...
4
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6answers
533 views
How to understand numbers that become really large?
If we begin with a notion of number N that we denote F(N) as a function of time, can a decidable procedure exist on definability of the growth of numbers? Inspired by Tipler's Omega point and ...
3
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1answer
142 views
What is the “New Essentialism”?
Is the "New Essentialism" simply a return to Aristotelianism masked in new terminology, or is it a novel contribution to modern philosophy?
See:
Brian Ellis's Philosophy of Nature: A Guide to the ...
3
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0answers
91 views
Where does Aristotle's Posterior Analytics disagree with modern philosophy of science?
Aristotle's Posterior Analytics is the basis of the modern scientific method of arguing from effects to the causes of things ("demonstration quia" or "a posteriori").
The ideal [of a unified ...
3
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2answers
114 views
Can an extensionless atom be also round?
In Nyaya-Vaisesika atomic theory atoms are both considered to be both without magnitude and round. How is this possible? For anything to be round, it must have at least a non-zero radius which ...
7
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3answers
668 views
Is time a physical factor or just a concept?
When thinking of cycles and myths, one cannot pass the idea of Kronos or Kali. That brought me to form some questions about the nature of time.
Three definitions for time:
Time is a measure of the ...
7
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3answers
362 views
Can we be Boltzmann brains? Or, how can we be sure there is no conspiracy about the past?
The way things are traditionally presented about time, there is the present, the past is fixed, and the future is open. The second law of thermodynamics is invoked. But how can we be so sure the past ...
4
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2answers
191 views
Is the conservation of matter/energy principle and 'quanta' of Physics implicit in Lucretius ontology?
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophys entry on Lucretius has:
"First comes, in effect, Lucretius' ontology. Nothing comes into being out of nothing or perishes into nothing. The only two per se ...
10
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6answers
392 views
How much philosophy should a physicist know?
I began to read Hawkings recent book 'A Grand Design' sometime ago and noticed that he savages philosophy, he says '...philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in ...
10
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6answers
578 views
Do fundamental concepts in physics have any logical basis?
After years of studying physics I am suddenly struck by the question - What is energy? Wikipedia defines it thus:
Energy is often understood as the ability a physical system has to do
work on ...
12
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5answers
478 views
What distinguishes cause from effect when they are simultaneous?
At a high level, distinguishing cause and effect is typically easy enough: the cause comes first. I drop a ball off a roof; therefore, it falls and hits the ground. But on a fundamental level, physics ...
5
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4answers
2k views
Was Einstein a philosopher?
Albert Einstein described the fact that he believed in 'god'; yet, he did not define that god as a personal god who actually existed as a separate being. He used the concept to describe everything ...
