…Broaden your horizons in the new year with everyone’s favorite philosophy of science database. Here are some tricks to ease the experience. Get Started Reading Books and Articles on the Cheap. Trying to save money this year? Stop paying so much to read! Get Started Learning General Relativity Online. Free general relativity — what more could you ask for in 2009? Get Started Improving Your Philosophical Apparel. Get a new look for the new year. Her…
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…review over at Backreaction. My favorite two of her many suggestions are: Online interface for anonymous author-reviewer communication. Why keep the slow (and frankly archaic) editor-mediated communication between author and reviewer, when everyone has access to the interwebs? An anonymized online interface would be quicker, easier, and more useful. In particular, it would allow for quick clarificatory questions, and even back-and-forth discussio…
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…a of truth itself. Truth is just the notion that specific instances of the generic form of semantics I oppose most commonly employ in their respective foundations—that genus of semantics that attributes semantic content to a theoretical representation based on the accuracy of the fit of its predictions to the results of the empirical, quantitative measurements made on the system it purports to model. In other words, my argument is with accounts of…
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…remain at least three topics of interest, where I suspect a clever young researcher could make interesting progress in the field. What to do in the history and philosophy of physics. Curie originally made use of his principle in order to calculate the electric field that is produced when a crystal is compressed. This curious phenomenon, which Curie and his brother Jean discovered, is called the Piezoelectric Effect, and has interesting application…
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…ve all been used in the title of a single scientific paper. The “Report of the Dark Energy Task Force” is available here on arxiv.org. Obviously, it’s hard not to love a paper like this. The reasons appear to break down roughly as follows. Of course, as I’ve noted before, there remain many alternatives to dark energy cosmology. But without a title like this, I’m afraid the competition is doomed. Related Posts: Map of the cosmic acceleration litera…
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