Photo Credit: John D. Norton The University of Pittsburgh has announced the establishment of the Nicholas Rescher Prize for Contributions to Systematic Philosophy. The details: Rescher Prize gold medal for…
Read moreA peek inside the mind of a mathematician
This is not new, but it’s one of the very best math videos on the inter-tubes. It’s designed by Bill Thurston, who’s known not only for his mathematical talent (winning him…
Read moreMore Philosophy of Physics in the Blogosphere
Readers 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 more"An elementary particle ‘is’ an irreducible representation"
A 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 moreUnitary operators and spacetime symmetries
In 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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