…your business model runs completely counter to the aims of the academic community, for this reason: academic publishing is not like commercial publishing. Stop conflating the two. I know of nary an academic that is publishing for the bling. So, stop thinking of us as obscure niche counterparts to J. K. Rowling. Scholarly authors would be crazy to write books for the tiny (or often non-existent) monetary compensation. They do it to disseminate inf…
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…Bas: QM An Empiricist View Also, some classic unpublished texts: David Malament, Notes on Geometry & Spacetime Rob Clifton, Introductory Notes on QM Also, quickly becoming classics: Brown, Harvey: Physical Relativity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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…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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…I call this the ‘Jesuit law’ of free fall. There was no agreed upon experimental evidence in the 1640’s that could verify one law and falsify the other. (Each side claimed to have experiments that vindicated their law, and disproved their competitor’s law.) However, a clever theoretician might still try to use purely theoretical means to prove one side false. The Challenge. Prove that the Jesuit law is false, without assuming Galileo’s law. Some…
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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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