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Statistical mechanics is the third pillar of modern physics, next to quantum theory and relativity theory. It aims to account for the behaviour of macroscopic systems in terms of the dynamical laws that govern their microscopic constituents and probabilistic assumptions about them. In this Element, the authors investigate the philosophical and foundational issues that arise in SM. The authors introduce the two main theoretical approaches in SM, Boltzmannian SM and Gibbsian SM, and discuss how they conceptualise equilibrium and explain the approach to it. In doing so, the authors examine how probabilities are introduced into the theories, how they deal with irreversibility, how they understand the relation between the micro and the macro level, and how the two approaches relate to each other. Throughout, the authors also pinpoint open problems that can be subject of future research. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This book presents and defends an interpretation of the precautionary principle from the perspective of philosophy of science.
Introducing the reader to the very latest developments in the philosophical foundations of physics, this book covers advanced material at a level suitable for beginner and intermediate students. A detailed overview is provided of the central debates in the philosophy of quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, quantum computation, and quantum gravity. Each chapter consists of a 'state of the art' review written by a specialist in the field and introduces the reader to the relevant formal aspects along with the philosophical implications. These, and the various interpretive options, are developed in a self-contained, clear, and concise manner. Special care is given to situating the reader within the contemporary debates by providing numerous references and readings. This book thus enables both philosophers and physicists to engage with the most pressing problems in contemporary philosophy of physics in a fruitful way.
Autonomous Nature investigates the history of nature as an active, often unruly force in tension with nature as a rational, logical order from ancient times to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Along with subsequent advances in mechanics, hydrodynamics, thermodynamics, and electromagnetism, nature came to be perceived as an orderly, rational, physical world that could be engineered, controlled, and managed. Autonomous Nature focuses on the history of unpredictability, why it was a problem for the ancient world through the Scientific Revolution, and why it is a problem for today. The work is set in the context of vignettes about unpredictable events such as the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, the Bubonic Plague, the Lisbon Earthquake, and efforts to understand and predict the weather and natural disasters. This book is an ideal text for courses on the environment, environmental history, history of science, or the philosophy of science.
Dimensional quantities such as length, mass and charge, i.e., numbers combined with a conventional unit, are essential components of theories in the sciences, especially physics, chemistry and biology. Do they represent a world with absolute physical magnitudes, or are they merely magnitude ratios in disguise? Would we notice a difference if all the distances or charges in the world suddenly doubled? These central questions of this Element are illustrated by imagining how one would convey the meaning of a kilogram to aliens if one were only allowed to communicate via Morse code.
This Handbook combines coverage of traditional areas in the philosophy of science, such as causation, explanation, and theory structure, with chapters on new areas such as philosophy of astronomy, data, complexity theory, and emergence. The articles are accessible to scientifically educated non-philosophers as well as to philosophers.
A comprehensive and accessible introduction, as well as an original contribution, to the main philosophical issues raised by climate science.
This book is about the simulation and modeling of novel chaotic systems within the frame of fractal-fractional operators. The methods used, their convergence, stability, and error analysis are given, and this is the first book to offer mathematical modeling and simulations of chaotic problems with a wide range of fractal-fractional operators, to find solutions. Numerical Methods for Fractal-Fractional Differential Equations and Engineering: Simulations and Modeling provides details for stability, convergence, and analysis along with numerical methods and their solution procedures for fractal-fractional operators. The book offers applications to chaotic problems and simulations using multiple fractal-fractional operators and concentrates on models that display chaos. The book details how these systems can be predictable for a while and then can appear to become random. Practitioners, engineers, researchers, and senior undergraduate and graduate students from mathematics and engineering disciplines will find this book of interest._
This volume, the third in this Springer series, contains selected papers from the four workshops organized by the ESF Research Networking Programme "The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective" (PSE) in 2010: Pluralism in the Foundations of Statistics Points of Contact between the Philosophy of Physics and the Philosophy of Biology The Debate on Mathematical Modeling in the Social Sciences Historical Debates about Logic, Probability and Statistics The volume is accordingly divided in four sections, each of them containing papers coming from the workshop focussing on one of these themes. While the programme's core topic for the year 2010 was probability and statistics, the organizers ...
Metaphysics has often held that laws of nature, if legitimate, must be time-independent. Yet mounting evidence from the foundations of science suggests that this constraint may be obsolete. This book provides arguments against this atemporality conjecture, which it locates both in metaphysics and in the philosophy of science, drawing on developments in a range of fields, from the foundations of physics to the philosophy of finance. It then seeks to excavate an alternative philosophical lineage which reconciles time-dependent laws with determinism, converging in the thought of Immanuel Kant.