Download or read book Identity in Physics written by Steven French and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-06-22 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can quantum particles be regarded as individuals, just like books, tables and people? According to the 'received' view - articulated by several physicists in the immediate aftermath of the quantum revolution - quantum physics itself tells us they cannot: quantum particles, unlike their classical counterparts, must be regarded as 'non-individuals' in some sense. However, recent work has indicated that this is not the whole story and that the theory is also consistent with the position that such particles can be taken to be individuals, albeit at a metaphysical price. Drawing on philosophical accounts of identity and individuality, as well as the histories of both classical and quantum physics, the authors explore these two alternative metaphysical packages. In particular, they argue that if quantum particles are regarded as individuals, then Leibniz's famous Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles is in fact violated. Recent discussions of this conclusion are analysed in detail and, again, the costs involved in saving the Principle are carefully considered. Taking the alternative package, the authors deploy recent work in non-standard logic and set theory to indicate how we can make sense of the idea that objects can be non-individuals. The concluding chapter suggests how these results might then be extended to quantum field theory. Identity in Physics brings together a range of work in this area and further develops the authors' own contributions to the debate. Uniquely, as the title indicates, it situates this work in the appropriate formal, historical, and philosophical contexts.
Download or read book Identity in Physics written by Steven French and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2010 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can quantum particles be regarded as individuals, just like books, tables and people? According to the 'received' view - articulated by several physicists in the immediate aftermath of the quantum revolution - quantum physics itself tells us they cannot: quantum particles, unlike their classical counterparts, must be regarded as 'non-individuals' in some sense. However, recent work has indicated that this is not the whole story and that the theory is also consistent with the position that such particles can be taken to be individuals, albeit at a metaphysical price. Drawing on philosophical accounts of identity and individuality, as well as the histories of both classical and quantum physics, the authors explore these two alternative metaphysical packages. In particular, they argue that if quantum particles are regarded as individuals, then Leibniz's famous Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles is in fact violated. Recent discussions of this conclusion are analysed in detail and, again, the costs involved in saving the Principle are carefully considered. Taking the alternative package, the authors deploy recent work in non-standard logic and set theory to indicate how we can make sense of the idea that objects can be non-individuals. The concluding chapter suggests how these results might then be extended to quantum field theory. Identity in Physics brings together a range of work in this area and further develops the authors' own contributions to the debate. Uniquely, as the title indicates, it situates this work in the appropriate formal, historical, and philosophical contexts.
Download or read book Identity in Physics written by Steven French and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-06-22 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can quantum particles be regarded as individuals, just like books, tables and people? According to the 'received' view - articulated by several physicists in the immediate aftermath of the quantum revolution - quantum physics itself tells us they cannot: quantum particles, unlike their classical counterparts, must be regarded as 'non-individuals' in some sense. However, recent work has indicated that this is not the whole story and that the theory is also consistent with theposition that such particles can be taken to be individuals, albeit at a metaphysical price.Drawing on philosophical accounts of identity and individuality, as well as the histories of both classical and quantum physics, the authors explore these two alternative metaphysical packages. In particular, they argue that if quantum particles are regarded as individuals, then Leibniz's famous Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles is in fact violated. Recent discussions of this conclusion are analysed in detail and, again, the costs involved in saving the Principle are carefullyconsidered.Taking the alternative package, the authors deploy recent work in non-standard logic and set theory to indicate how we can make sense of the idea that objects can be non-individuals. The concluding chapter suggests how these results might then be extended to quantum field theory.Identity in Physics brings together a range of work in this area and further develops the authors' own contributions to the debate. Uniquely, as the title indicates, it situates this work in the appropriate formal, historical, and philosophical contexts.
Download or read book Physics Education and Gender written by Allison J. Gonsalves and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-04-24 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Edited Volume engages with concepts of gender and identity as they are mobilized in research to understand the experiences of learners, teachers and practitioners of physics. The focus of this collection is on extending theoretical understandings of identity as a means to explore the construction of gender in physics education research. This collection expands an understanding of gendered participation in physics from a binary gender deficit model to a more complex understanding of gender as performative and intersectional with other social locations (e.g., race, class, LGBT status, ability, etc). This volume contributes to a growing scholarship using sociocultural frameworks to understand learning and participation in physics, and that seeks to challenge dominant understandings of who does physics and what counts as physics competence. Studying gender in physics education research from a perspective of identity and identity construction allows us to understand participation in physics cultures in new ways. We are able to see how identities shape and are shaped by inclusion and exclusion in physics practices, discourses that dominate physics cultures, and actions that maintain or challenge structures of dominance and subordination in physics education. The chapters offered in this book focus on understanding identity and its usefulness in various contexts with various learner or practitioner populations. This scholarship collectively presents us with a broad picture of the complexity inherent in doing physics and doing gender.
Download or read book Identity and Indiscernibility in Quantum Mechanics written by Tomasz Bigaj and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes metaphysical consequences of the quantum theory of many particles with respect to the fundamental notions of identity, individuality and discernibility. The main focus is on the proper interpretation of the quantum formalism in relation to the role of permutation invariance and the adequate representation of the properties of individual subsystems. Two main approaches to the issue of the individuation of quantum particles are distinguished and thoroughly discussed. These approaches differ radically with respect to their metaphysical consequences - while one of them implies the complete indiscernibility of quantum particles of the same kind, the other one restores the possibility of discerning individual particles by their properties. We connect the problem of quantum individuation and discernibility with an analysis of the concept of quantum entanglement, and we also discuss identity over time and in counterfactual scenarios. Tomasz Bigaj is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw, Poland. His previous publications include the book Non-locality and Possible Worlds (2006) and numerous articles on various topics in philosophy of physics, philosophical logic and analytic metaphysics (Synthese, Erkenntnis, Foundations of Physics, Foundations of Science).
Download or read book Identity and Individuality in Classical and Quantum Physics written by Steven Richard Douglas French and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 732 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Physics Education and Gender written by and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Edited Volume engages with concepts of gender and identity as they are mobilized in research to understand the experiences of learners, teachers and practitioners of physics. The focus of this collection is on extending theoretical understandings of identity as a means to explore the construction of gender in physics education research. This collection expands an understanding of gendered participation in physics from a binary gender deficit model to a more complex understanding of gender as performative and intersectional with other social locations (e.g., race, class, LGBT status, ability, etc). This volume contributes to a growing scholarship using sociocultural frameworks to understand learning and participation in physics, and that seeks to challenge dominant understandings of who does physics and what counts as physics competence. Studying gender in physics education research from a perspective of identity and identity construction allows us to understand participation in physics cultures in new ways. We are able to see how identities shape and are shaped by inclusion and exclusion in physics practices, discourses that dominate physics cultures, and actions that maintain or challenge structures of dominance and subordination in physics education. The chapters offered in this book focus on understanding identity and its usefulness in various contexts with various learner or practitioner populations. This scholarship collectively presents us with a broad picture of the complexity inherent in doing physics and doing gender.
Download or read book Everywhere and Everywhen written by Nick Huggett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, written for the general reader, explores the fundamental issues concerning the nature of time and space, and quantum mechanics. It shows how physics and philosophy work together to answer some of the deepest questions ever asked about the world.
Download or read book Quantum Ontology written by Peter J. Lewis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-13 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphysicians should pay attention to quantum mechanics. Why? Not because it provides definitive answers to many metaphysical questions-the theory itself is remarkably silent on the nature of the physical world, and the various interpretations of the theory on offer present conflicting ontological pictures. Rather, quantum mechanics is essential to the metaphysician because it reshapes standard metaphysical debates and opens up unforeseen new metaphysical possibilities. Even if quantum mechanics provides few clear answers, there are good reasons to think that any adequate understanding of the quantum world will result in a radical reshaping of our classical world-view in some way or other. Whatever the world is like at the atomic scale, it is almost certainly not the swarm of particles pushed around by forces that is often presupposed. This book guides readers through the theory of quantum mechanics and its implications for metaphysics in a clear and accessible way. The theory and its various interpretations are presented with a minimum of technicality. The consequences of these interpretations for metaphysical debates concerning realism, indeterminacy, causation, determinism, holism, and individuality (among other topics) are explored in detail, stressing the novel form that the debates take given the empirical facts in the quantum domain. While quantum mechanics may not deliver unconditional pronouncements on these issues, the range of possibilities consistent with our knowledge of the empirical world is relatively small-and each possibility is metaphysically revisionary in some way. This book will appeal to researchers, students, and anybody else interested in how science informs our world-view.
Download or read book Seeing Double written by Peter Pesic and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-06-17 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unknown history of surveillance in relation to changing systems of representation and visual arts practice. The separateness and connection of individuals is perhaps the central question of human life: What, exactly, is my individuality? To what degree is it unique? To what degree can it be shared, and how? To the many philosophical and literary speculations about these topics over time, modern science has added the curious twist of quantum theory, which requires that the elementary particles of which everything consists have no individuality at all. All aspects of chemistry depend on this lack of individuality, as do many branches of physics. From where, then, does our individuality come? In Seeing Double, Peter Pesic invites readers to explore this intriguing set of questions. He draws on literary and historical examples that open the mind (from Homer to Martin Guerre to Kafka), philosophical analyses that have helped to make our thinking and speech more precise, and scientific work that has enabled us to characterize the phenomena of nature. Though he does not try to be all-inclusive, Pesic presents a broad range of ideas, building toward a specific point of view: that the crux of modern quantum theory is its clash with our ordinary concept of individuality. This represents a departure from the usual understanding of quantum theory. Pesic argues that what is bizarre about quantum theory becomes more intelligible as we reconsider what we mean by individuality and identity in ordinary experience. In turn, quantum identity opens a new perspective on us.
Download or read book How Physics Makes Us Free written by J. T. Ismael and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1687 Isaac Newton ushered in a new scientific era in which laws of nature could be used to predict the movements of matter with almost perfect precision. Newton's physics also posed a profound challenge to our self-understanding, however, for the very same laws that keep airplanes in the air and rivers flowing downhill tell us that it is in principle possible to predict what each of us will do every second of our entire lives, given the early conditions of the universe. Can it really be that even while you toss and turn late at night in the throes of an important decision and it seems like the scales of fate hang in the balance, that your decision is a foregone conclusion? Can it really be that everything you have done and everything you ever will do is determined by facts that were in place long before you were born? This problem is one of the staples of philosophical discussion. It is discussed by everyone from freshman in their first philosophy class, to theoretical physicists in bars after conferences. And yet there is no topic that remains more unsettling, and less well understood. If you want to get behind the façade, past the bare statement of determinism, and really try to understand what physics is telling us in its own terms, read this book. The problem of free will raises all kinds of questions. What does it mean to make a decision, and what does it mean to say that our actions are determined? What are laws of nature? What are causes? What sorts of things are we, when viewed through the lenses of physics, and how do we fit into the natural order? Ismael provides a deeply informed account of what physics tells us about ourselves. The result is a vision that is abstract, alien, illuminating, and-Ismael argues-affirmative of most of what we all believe about our own freedom. Written in a jargon-free style, How Physics Makes Us Free provides an accessible and innovative take on a central question of human existence.
Download or read book Philosophy of Science written by William Marias Malisoff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Metaphysics of Identity over Time written by D. Oderberg and published by Springer. This book was released on 1993-10-21 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a systematic investigation into the metaphysical foundations of identity over time. The author elaborates and evaluates the most common theory about the persistence of objects through time and change, namely the classical theory of spatio-temporal continuity. He shows how the theory requires an ontology of temporal parts, according to which objects are made up of temporally extended segments or stages. This ontology is criticized as unwarranted by modern space-time physics, and as internally incoherent. The author argues that identity over time should be seen as a primitive or unanalysable phenomenon, and that the so-called puzzle cases and paradoxes of identity can be dealt with without recourse to such an ontology.
Download or read book The Physics of Brand written by Aaron Keller and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-07-21 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welcome to a brand-new way of thinking about branding. The Physics of Brand is an exploration of how brands evolve in time and space. Drawing on experience working with companies such as Patagonia, General Mills, Target, and more, this book provides an exciting new systems approach to branding. By focusing on how brands and people actually interrelate, you'll gain a new perspective on brand growth and interaction. Complete with case studies to illustrate these concepts and Thought Experiments to get you thinking conceptually, The Physics of Brand is your new textbook on brand theory.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Quantum Physics written by Cord Friebe and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-06-21 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a thorough and up-to-date introduction to the philosophy of quantum physics. Although quantum theory is renowned for its spectacular empirical successes, controversial discussion about how it should be understood continue to rage today. In this volume, the authors provide an overview of its numerous philosophical challenges: Do quantum objects violate the principle of causality? Are particles of the same type indistinguishable and therefore not individual entities? Do quantum objects retain their identity over time? How does a compound quantum system relate to its parts? These questions are answered here within different interpretational approaches to quantum theory. Finally, moving to Quantum Field Theory, we find that the problem of non-locality is exacerbated. Philosophy of quantum physics is aimed at philosophers with an interest in physics, while also serving to familiarize physicists with many of the essential philosophical questions of their subject.
Download or read book The Logical Structure of Mathematical Physics written by Joseph D. Sneed and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about scientific theories of a particular kind - theories of mathematical physics. Examples of such theories are classical and relativis tic particle mechanics, classical electrodynamics, classical thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, hydrodynamics, and quantum mechanics. Roughly, these are theories in which a certain mathematical structure is employed to make statements about some fragment of the world. Most of the book is simply an elaboration of this rough characterization of theories of mathematical physics. It is argued that each theory of mathematical physics has associated with it a certain characteristic mathematical struc ture. This structure may be used in a variety of ways to make empirical claims about putative applications of the theory. Typically - though not necessarily - the way this structure is used in making such claims requires that certain elements in the structure play essentially different roles. Some playa "theoretical" role; others playa "non-theoretical" role. For example, in classical particle mechanics, mass and force playa theoretical role while position plays a non-theoretical role. Some attention is given to showing how this distinction can be drawn and describing precisely the way in which the theoretical and non-theoretical elements function in the claims of the theory. An attempt is made to say, rather precisely, what a theory of mathematical physics is and how you tell one such theory from anothe- what the identity conditions for these theories are.
Download or read book The Third Piece Unifying General Relativity Quantum Mechanics and Personal Identity written by Anderthal Kord and published by Mill City Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 2010-07 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thinking outside the box (of Reality) can transform both the Physical Universe and Personal Identity. General relativity and quantum mechanics are two of the most successful scientific theories in existence. And, yet, general relativity and quantum mechanics conflict with each other in deep, fundamental ways in their descriptions of reality. Because of this, it has proven impossible to unify them into one single coherent description of our physical universe. Apart from this conflict-or perhaps because of it-they also possess an inherently fatal flaw: neither reality they describe ultimately makes any sense, within the context of personal identity. "The Third Piece" describes the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics conceptually, as they are, without the need for new mathematics or physics. What is needed is the third piece to the puzzle: Personal Identity. Including this piece and unifying all three pieces simultaneously results in a reality that makes sense for all three: physically, logically, conceptually, and philosophically.
