Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics

Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics PDF Author: Karl Raimund Popper
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 0415091128
Category : Physics
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
The author proposes an interpretation of physics, and an entire cosmology, which is realist; conjectural; deductivist and objectivist; anti-positivist; and anti-instrumentalist. He stresses understanding; reminding us that our ignorance grows faster than our conjectural knowledge.

Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics

Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics PDF Author: Karl Raimund Popper
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 0415091128
Category : Physics
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
The author proposes an interpretation of physics, and an entire cosmology, which is realist; conjectural; deductivist and objectivist; anti-positivist; and anti-instrumentalist. He stresses understanding; reminding us that our ignorance grows faster than our conjectural knowledge.

The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory

The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory PDF Author: Werner Heisenberg
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486318419
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Nobel Laureate discusses quantum theory, uncertainty, wave mechanics, work of Dirac, Schroedinger, Compton, Einstein, others. "An authoritative statement of Heisenberg's views on this aspect of the quantum theory." — Nature.

The Infamous Boundary

The Infamous Boundary PDF Author: David Wick
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9780387947266
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
"Provides (an)...accurate portrait of the essence of the disputes, both epistemological and technical, that characterize contemporary inquiry. This book will profit any reader-physicist, mathematician, philosopher, or civilian-who wants a comprehensive and intelligible survey of this pesky episode in fundamental physical theory."-CHOICE "I have no hesitation in recommending this book to anyone interested in the history, philosophy or sociology of science, and it is worth adding to the library shelf on quantum theory."-PHYSICS WORLD

Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism

Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism PDF Author: Christopher Norris
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134595255
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This book is a critical introduction to the long-standing debate concerning the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics and the problems it has posed for physicists and philosophers from Einstein to the present. Quantum theory has been a major infulence on postmodernism, and presents significant problems for realists. Keeping his own realist position in check, Christopher Norris subjects a wide range of key opponents and supporters of realism to a high and equal level of scrutiny. With a characteristic combination of rigour and intellectual generosity, he draws out the merits and weaknesses from opposing arguments. In a sequence of closely argued chapters, Norris examines the premises of orthodox quantum theory, as developed most influentially by Bohr and Heisenberg, and its impact on varous philosophical developments. These include the ideas developed by W.V Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Michael Dummett, Bas van Fraassen, and Hilary Puttnam. In each case, Norris argues, these thinkers have been influenced by the orthodox construal of quantum mechanics as requiring drastic revision of principles which had hitherto defined the very nature of scientific method, causal explanati and rational enquiry. Putting the case for a realist approach which adheres to well-tried scientific principles of causal reasoning and inference to the best explanation, Christopher Norris clarifies these debates to a non-specialist readership and scholars of philosophy, science studies and the philosophy of science alike. Quantum Theory and the Flight From Realism suggests that philosophical reflection can contribute to a better understanding of these crucial, current issues.

Realism and the Aim of Science

Realism and the Aim of Science PDF Author: Karl Popper
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135858950
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
Realism and the Aim of Science is one of the three volumes of Karl Popper’s Postscript to the Logic of scientific Discovery. The Postscript is the culmination of Popper’s work in the philosophy of physics and a new famous attack on subjectivist approaches to philosophy of science. Realism and the Aim of Science is the first volume of the Postcript. Popper here formulates and explains his non-justificationist theory of knowledge: science aims at true explanatory theories, yet it can never prove, or justify, any theory to be true, not even if is a true theory. Science must continue to question and criticise all its theories, even those that happen to be true. Realism and the Aim of Science presents Popper’s mature statement on scientific knowledge and offers important insights into his thinking on problems of method within science.

The Open Universe

The Open Universe PDF Author: Karl Popper
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135857830
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
The Open Universe is one of the three volumes of Karl Popper’s Postscript to the Logic of scientific Discovery. The Postscript is the culmination of Popper’s work in the philosophy of physics and a new famous attack on subjectivist approaches to philosophy of science.

Tales of the Quantum

Tales of the Quantum PDF Author: Art Hobson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190679638
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This is a book about the quanta that make up our universe--the highly unified bundles of energy of which everything is made. It explains wave-particle duality, randomness, quantum states, non-locality, Schrodinger's cat, quantum jumps, and more, in everyday language for non-scientists and scientists who wish to fathom science's most fundamental theory.

The Quantum Story

The Quantum Story PDF Author: Jim Baggott
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191604291
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
The twentieth century was defined by physics. From the minds of the world's leading physicists there flowed a river of ideas that would transport mankind to the pinnacle of wonderment and to the very depths of human despair. This was a century that began with the certainties of absolute knowledge and ended with the knowledge of absolute uncertainty. It was a century in which physicists developed weapons with the capacity to destroy our reality, whilst at the same time denying us the possibility that we can ever properly comprehend it. Almost everything we think we know about the nature of our world comes from one theory of physics. This theory was discovered and refined in the first thirty years of the twentieth century and went on to become quite simply the most successful theory of physics ever devised. Its concepts underpin much of the twenty-first century technology that we have learned to take for granted. But its success has come at a price, for it has at the same time completely undermined our ability to make sense of the world at the level of its most fundamental constituents. Rejecting the fundamental elements of uncertainty and chance implied by quantum theory, Albert Einstein once famously declared that 'God does not play dice'. Niels Bohr claimed that anybody who is not shocked by the theory has not understood it. The charismatic American physicist Richard Feynman went further: he claimed that nobody understands it. This is quantum theory, and this book tells its story. Jim Baggott presents a celebration of this wonderful yet wholly disconcerting theory, with a history told in forty episodes — significant moments of truth or turning points in the theory's development. From its birth in the porcelain furnaces used to study black body radiation in 1900, to the promise of stimulating new quantum phenomena to be revealed by CERN's Large Hadron Collider over a hundred years later, this is the extraordinary story of the quantum world. Oxford Landmark Science books are 'must-read' classics of modern science writing which have crystallized big ideas, and shaped the way we think.

Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam PDF Author: Christopher Norris
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719061967
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This study examines Hilary Putnam's work in epistemology, philosophy of science and mathematics, philosophical logic and semantics and cognitive psychology. It takes account of his various shifts in philosophical viewpoint over the past four decades, and demonstrates how Putnam arrived at the different positions he has occupied during his career, and discusses the various forms of anti-realist doctrine with which he has engaged. The workd offers commentary on Putnam's writing about conceptual problems in the interpretation of quantum mechanics and places Putnam's work in a wider philosophical context, relating it to various contemporary debates in epistemology and the philosophy of science.

Fact and Method

Fact and Method PDF Author: Richard W. Miller
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691228361
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 628

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Book Description
In this bold work, of broad scope and rich erudition, Richard Miller sets out to reorient the philosophy of science. By questioning both positivism and its leading critics, he develops new solutions to the most urgent problems about justification, explanation, and truth. Using a wealth of examples from both the natural and the social sciences, Fact and Method applies the new account of scientific reason to specific questions of method in virtually every field of inquiry, including biology, physics, history, sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology, and literary theory. Explicit and up-to-date analysis of leading alternative views and a wealth of examples make it an ideal introduction to the philosophy of science, as well as a powerful attempt to change the field. Like the works of Hempel, Reichenbach, and Nagel in an earlier generation, it will challenge, instruct, and help anyone with an interest in science and its limits. For the past quarter-century, the philosophy of science has been in a crisis brought on by the failure of the positivist project of resolving all basic methodological questions by applying absolutely general rules, valid for all fields at all times. Professor Miller presents a new view in which what counts as an explanation, a cause, a confirming test, or a compelling case for the existence of an unobservable is determined by frameworks of specific substantive principles, rationally adopted in the light of the actual history of inquiry. While the history of science has usually been the material for relativism, Professor Miller uses arguments of Darwin, Newton, Einstein, Galileo, and others both to undermine positivist conceptions of rationality and to support the positivists' optimism that important theoretical findings are often justifiable from all reasonable perspectives.