With 20-20 hindsight, we all agree that Einstein’s discoveries of 1905 revolutionized nearly every area of fundamental physics. But what did scientists think at the time? One telling source is Poincaré’s 1907 account of…
Read moreI was once a teaching assistant for John Earman’s “Introduction to Philosophy of Science” undergraduate course. On the very first day of class, John put this image on the overhead…
Read moreReaders of this blog may be interested in Chris Wüthrich’s new blog on the philosophy of physics, Taking up Spacetime. Chris is a philosopher of physics at UCSD, and fellow…
Read moreA well-known 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…
Read moreIn quantum mechanics, certain unitary operators have been understood since the time of Wigner in terms of spacetime symmetries. Why? The foundation for this kind of thinking has an interpretive and…
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