…the mail for free. Here’s how to find a public library in your area. Or, visit your local University’s library for an even grander selection. Buy very, very cheap books. Ok, so this one’s almost free. There are hundreds of books selling at less than 1 cent on Amazon. They’re not all worth a penny, but there are some real jewels among the noise, which you can get for only the price of shipping. To find them, try browsing by subject, and then selec…
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…tion of passage. Rather, physics provides a reliable account of the regularities underlying our common experience of time passing. It does this by providing us with a concrete relationship between any given now, together with its future and past. 1. We Experience Time Passing We can apprehend the passage of time through the succession of three mental states, in this order: the expectation of an event; the experience of the event; and the memory of…
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…erpretation of this symmetry. These theories T and T’ predict different radii, which might seem like a real physical distinction. If so, one wouldn’t want to just write this off as `pure gauge.’ So apparently we’re stuck with underdetermination. And as Nick rattled off various examples of underdetermination, it seemed clear that no classic example of underdetermination (such as the Poincare sphere or a Leibnizian view of metaphysics) is analogous….
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…gacy. Yuval Ne’eman and Shlomo Sternberg have recorded an old particle physicist’s adage: Ever since the fundamental paper of Wigner on the irreducible representations of the Poincaré group, it has been a (perhaps implicit) definition in physics that an elementary particle ‘is’ an irreducible representation of the group, G, of ‘symmetries of nature’. (Ne’eman and Sternberg 1991, 327.) This idea captures much of the physical basis of GSR. Let’s dis…
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…discourse which is as distinct from the description and explanation of empirical fact, as is the language of prescription and justification. Although Sellars was concerned with the philosophy of mind, there is something important here for philosophers of physics to learn as well. A major activity of physics is the collection of empirical facts. Another is the prediction and justification of these facts. But the activity of investigating meaning i…
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