#philosophyofphysics — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #philosophyofphysics, aggregated by home.social.
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A Pendulum for the Multiverse: David Albert, Hugh Everett, and the Worlds We Never Feel
On my grandfather's porch in North Loup, Nebraska, the ground kept its promises. Summer evenings the floorboards held the day's heat, the corn stood in rows that ran clear to the horizon, and nothing in all that flat immensity so much as trembled. When a teacher first told me the Earth was spinning at close to a thousand miles an hour while racing around the Sun at sixty-seven thousand more, I pressed my bare feet against those boards and waited to feel the ride. The stillness came back like a verdict. Whatever the books claimed, my soles reported a stationary world, and a boy trusts his soles. Every child who has run that experiment has rebuilt, in miniature, the strongest objection the seventeenth century could throw at Copernicus. If the Earth turns, why does a dropped stone land at the foot of the tower and never a few feet to the west? Why does the gale of our orbital speed fail to strip the leaves from the trees? The objection deserved respect because it rested on evidence, on the honest testimony of every human body that had ever stood still. It took Galileo's ship, and then Newton's laws, to explain why that testimony, though honest, was worthless. […] -
Dimensional Analysis is a Gauge Theory
by Benjamin Muntz
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.21695Really interesting paper! I don't understand all of it, but the parts I do make a lot of sense to me. Kind of crazy to think of dimensions as charges, but it works and it allows things like fractional dimensions. I think it can go the other way too, where it could help with making sense of gauge theories.
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@chemoelectric Action by simultaneous motion can easily be imagined, but could it not be a fault with the independent versus dependent idea of mechanised energy experiments? I’m thinking of energy being exclusively independent as in photons or dependent as in the projection of their wave like properties. In opposition to that, what matters is how matter interacts; so the properties of spin are constant across distances and do not contradict the relativity of time. Or to posit it from the dialectic of a philosophical standpoint, the abstract classification and reductionist division of sets is in opposition to the interdependent foundation of their categories. #PhilosophyOfPhysics #TheoreticalFoundations
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🧩 “Is #structure the true #reality?”🌐
In the current #Zoomposium, we discuss with #MichaelEsfeld why #reality does not consist of things, but of #structures and #relationships. His moderate ontic #structural realism combines #quantum physics, #metaphysics, and #consciousness.
📺 https://youtu.be/tUcT4a-UNr0
🔗 https://philosophies.de/index.php/2026/02/27/struktur-die-wahre-realitaet/
#Holism #QuantumMechanics #PhilosophyOfScience #QuantumHumeanism #Zoomposium #PhilosophyOfPhysics #PhilosophyOfMind
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🧩 “Is #structure the true #reality?”🌐
In the current #Zoomposium, we discuss with #MichaelEsfeld why #reality does not consist of things, but of #structures and #relationships. His moderate ontic #structural realism combines #quantum physics, #metaphysics, and #consciousness.
📺 https://youtu.be/tUcT4a-UNr0
🔗 https://philosophies.de/index.php/2026/02/27/struktur-die-wahre-realitaet/
#Holism #QuantumMechanics #PhilosophyOfScience #QuantumHumeanism #Zoomposium #PhilosophyOfPhysics #PhilosophyOfMind
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🌀 #QuantumPhysics: #Duality, #Logic & the end of our everyday understanding ⚛️🤯
#Zoomposium with #GerhardRoth on questions of #physics, the understanding of #reality, #knowledge, and #consciousness from a #neuroscientific and #philosophical perspective.
📎 https://philosophies.de/index.php/2021/12/05/wie-wirklich-ist-bewusstsein/
📺 https://youtu.be/0LG4gU_jfik
#Duality #QuantumLogic #WaveParticleDuality #UncertaintyPrinciple #Heisenberg #Einstein #LawsOfNature #Epistemology #PhilosophyOfPhysics #PhilosophyOfMind #Reality
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🌍 “#Reality is innocent—it is our #concepts that are guilty.” 📖
In a new #guestarticle, #BerndStein proposes an #epistemologicalshift in #perspective:
👉 It is not #properties that are fundamental, but #possibilities of #description.
👉 The #mathematics of #quantum theory does not say what the #world is like, but under what #conditions it can be determined
💬 Contradictions welcome at: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2025/12/20/die-realitaet-ist-unschuldig/
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🌍 “#Reality is innocent—it is our #concepts that are guilty.” 📖
In a new #guestarticle, #BerndStein proposes an #epistemologicalshift in #perspective:
👉 It is not #properties that are fundamental, but #possibilities of #description.
👉 The #mathematics of #quantum theory does not say what the #world is like, but under what #conditions it can be determined
💬 Contradictions welcome at: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2025/12/20/die-realitaet-ist-unschuldig/
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A well-presented explanation of the relevance of philosophy to physics.
https://aeon.co/essays/why-do-philosophy-of-physics-when-you-can-do-physics-itself
#AeonMagazine #PhilosopyOfScience #PhysicsTheory #PhilosophyOfPhysics #ShutUpAndCalculate #ScienceTheories #ScientificTheory #Philosodon
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What are the fundamental (philosophical) assumptions that we make about our universe in order to have predictive model of the universe based on the phenomenological evidence?
I can think of two:
1) Spacetime inveriance
2) LocalityPerhaps also:
0) Objective reality exists
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#TimMaudlin - #Realism vs. #Antirealism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiZI91ggRNo
#Philosophy #Metaphysics #Epistemology #Ontology #Perception #Consciousness #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Mind #PhilosophyOfMind #Math #Maths #Mathematics #Model #Models #Physics #PhilosophyOfPhysics #PhilosophyOfScience #Science #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#PedroFerreira - #Physics of #FineTuning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQDVPzmDbJo
#PhilosophyOfPhysics #PhilosophyOfScience #Science #PhilosophyOfCosmology #Cosmology #Naturalness #QM #QuantumMechanics #QuantumPhysics #Higgs #Mass #CosmologicalConstant #FineStructureConstant #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#PhilosophyOfPhysics
#space
#EarlyModernPhilosophywrt the hiatus in
understanding the objectivity of physical spaceby
on one side,
on the other - in a way all - say of
#Spinoza
#Leibniz
#duChatelet
#Kantthere's an imop particularly interesting preprint by Aaron Wells (uni paderborn) on Émilie du Châtelet and the Post-Newtonian Debate on the Physical Significance of Mathematical Objects, viz.
https://philarchive.org/rec/
WELINA-2 -
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#PhilosophyOfPhysics
#space
#Leibniz
#Kantrather fortuitously this morning I found the English version of
J.R. Álvarezhttps://www.academia.edu/116274735/KANT_PHILOSOPHER_OF_PHYSICS_I_Bicentennial_Reflections
then turned to the 'metaphysische Anfangsgründe ..."-text he is about there and gladly found this #phil #sunday #word
"... Weil ich den erweiterten, obgleich immer noch materiellen Raum nur in Gedanken habe und mir von der Materie, die ihn bezeichnet, nichts bekannt ist, so abstrahire ich von dieser, und er wird daher wie ein reiner, nicht empirischer und absoluter Raum vorgestellt, mit dem ich jeden empirischen vergleichen und diesen in ihm als beweglich vorstellen kann, der also jederzeit als unbeweglich gilt. Ihn zum wirklichen Dinge zu machen, heisst die logische Allgemeinheit irgend eines Raumes, mit dem ich jeden empirischen als darin eingeschlossen vergleichen kann, in eine physische Allgemeinheit des wirklichen Umfanges verwechseln, und die Vernunft in ihrer Idee missverstehen."
(I. Hauptstück - Phoronomie)
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During the UPAC colloquium work in progress session next Tuesday (28 Nov), we will be discussing the draft by Adrien De Sutter:
A Universe Lost to the World? On Speculative Origins; Or, Why the Universe may be running away from Cosmologists.
https://www.uu.nl/en/research/utrecht-philosophy-of-astronomy-cosmology/events/upac-colloquium -
During the UPAC colloquium reading session next Tuesday (16:00-17:00), we will be discussing a paper by Milan M. Ćirković and Slobodan Perović: "Alternative explanations of the cosmic microwave background: A historical and an epistemological perspective".
https://www.uu.nl/en/research/utrecht-philosophy-of-astronomy-cosmology/events/upac-colloquium
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#DavidWallace - #Philosophy of #Physics and #Cosmology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsW_p7gbK-c&ab_channel=CloserToTruth
#PhilosophyOfPhysics #PhilosophyOfCosmology #PhilosophyOfScience #QM #QuantumMechanics #SpaceTime #LawsOfNature #LawsOfPhysics #ScientificMethod #MeasurementProblem #MeasureProblem #Probability #Emergence #Observer #Consciousness #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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Cool, accessible article over at #Aeon about the strangeness and complexity of atoms and their components, and how the popular idea that atoms are mostly empty space is problematic.
(The author mentions an episode of Cosmos in which Sagan says that, and which I remember vividly despite the decades in between)
https://aeon.co/essays/why-the-empty-atom-picture-misunderstands-quantum-theory