…Bas: QM An Empiricist View Also, some classic unpublished texts: David Malament, Notes on Geometry & Spacetime Rob Clifton, Introductory Notes on QM Also, quickly becoming classics: Brown, Harvey: Physical Relativity Healey, Richard: Gauging What’s Real Lange, Marc: Introduction to the Philosophy of Physics Monographs contained in the Handbook of Philosophy of Physics, Earman & Butterfield (eds) One important book on the list, John Earman’s (1986)…
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…included: Richard Dawid on `String Theory and the Question of Theory Assessment’; Nick Hugget, `(Again) A Philosopher Looks at String Theory’; and Lee Smolin‘s `Remarks on the Reality of Time in Physics and Cosmology.’ 1. ASSESSING STRING THEORY We kicked the morning off with a few pots of coffee and a discussion with Richard about how we ought to assess String Theory. Richard has a background in theoretical physics, and has spent his fair share o…
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As Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance has pointed out, Entertainment Weekly is weighing in on the Greatest Books of the Last 25 Years. Like Sean, I am a bit disappointed in their selections. Most of my favorite books of the last 25 years are not even on the list. Where is Wald (1984)? Or Sean’s own book, for that matter? In fact, there is not one science book on EW’s list — not even a popular science book! So let me make a call for suggestions: Writ…
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…nd the Cosmos where Ashtekar is director. Our discussion was about the arguments underpinning the evidence for time asymmetry in fundamental physics. Our discussion has finally come out in a special issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics: Roberts (2014) Three merry roads to T-violation (philsci-archive) Ashtekar (2014) Response to Bryan Roberts: A new perspective on T violation (arxiv) Roberts (2014) Comment on Ashtekar: Gene…
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…e about your empiricism. Consider a Schwarzschild blackhole (spherically symmetric and non-rotating, simplified idealization of what is expected at CERN) with mass M. Then dM/dt = -K/M^2, where K is a (very large) constant (See Hobson et al, pp. 277). Let M get very, very small, since we are dealing with particle collisions and not collapsing super-structures. Then dM/dt will become an enormous negative number. In other words, any emergent mini-bl…
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