It’s official: the words ‘dark,’ ‘energy,’ ‘task,’ and ‘force’ have all been used in the title of a single scientific paper. The “Report of the Dark Energy Task Force” is…
Reasons to love the "Dark Energy Task Force"
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1907 Crisis in Mathematical Physics According to Poincaré
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…
Is philosophy fracturing, and what should we do about it?
I 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…
More 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…
"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…