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These original essays explore the philosophical implications of Newton's work. They address a wide range of topics including Newton's influence on his contemporaries and successors such as Locke and Kant, and his views on the methodology of science, on absolute space and time, and on the Deity.Howard Stein compares Newton's refusal to lock natural philosophy into a preexisting system with the more rigid philosophical predilections of his near-contemporaries Christian Huygens and John Locke. Richard Arthur's commentary provides a useful gloss on Stein's essay. Lawrence Sklar puzzles over Newton's attempts to provide a unified treatment of the various "real quantities": absolute space, time, a...
Shows how flow cytometry is integrated into modern biotechnology. This volume deals with issues of content, sensitivity, and high throughput informatics with applications in genomics, proteomics and protein-protein interactions, drug discovery, vaccine development, plant and reproductive biology, pharmacology and toxicology, and more.
In this book, Lawrence Sklar demonstrates the interdependence of science and philosophy by examining a number of crucial problems on the nature of space and time—problems that require for their resolution the resources of philosophy and of physics. The overall issues explored are our knowledge of the geometry of the world, the existence of spacetime as an entity over and above the material objects of the world, the relation between temporal order and causal order, and the problem of the direction of time. Without neglecting the most subtle philosophical points or the most advanced contributions of contemporary physics, the author has taken pains to make his explorations intelligible to the reader with no advanced training in physics, mathematics, or philosophy. The arguments are set forth step-by-step, beginning from first principles; and the philosophical discussions are supplemented in detail by nontechnical expositions of crucial features of physical theories.
Skeptics have cast doubt on the idea that scientific theories give us a true picture of an objective world. Lawrence Sklar examines three kinds of skeptical arguments about scientific truth, and explores the important role that these play within foundational science itself, especially physics. First, doubts have been expressed about the legitimacy of claiming truth for assertions about the realm of the unobservable. Second, scientific theories have been characterized as relying heavily on idealization of the physical systems they seek to describe. Third, it is noted that scientific theories tend to be transient, and even the best currently available are expected to be replaced in the future....
Newton's bucket, Einstein's elevator, Schrödinger's cat – these are some of the best-known examples of thought experiments in the natural sciences. But what function do these experiments perform? Are they really experiments at all? Can they help us gain a greater understanding of the natural world? How is it possible that we can learn new things just by thinking? In this revised and updated new edition of his classic text The Laboratory of the Mind, James Robert Brown continues to defend apriorism in the physical world. This edition features two new chapters, one on “counter thought experiments” and another on the development of inertial motion. With plenty of illustrations and updated coverage of the debate between Platonic rationalism and classic empiricism, this is a lively and engaging contribution to the field of philosophy of science.
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Lawrence Sklar offers a comprehensive, non-technical introduction to statistical mechanics and attempts to understand its foundational elements.
When a virtual journalist for a virtual newspaper reporting on the digital world of an online game lands on the real-world front page of the New York Times,it just might signal the dawn of a new era. Virtual journalist Peter Ludlow was banned from The Sims Onlinefor being a bit too good at his job--for reporting in his virtual tabloid The Alphaville Heraldon the cyber-brothels, crimes, and strong-arm tactics that had become rife in the game--and when the Times,the BBC, CNN, and other media outlets covered the story, users all over the Internet called the banning censorship. Seeking a new virtual home, Ludlow moved the Heraldto another virtual world--the powerful online environment of Second ...
This book focuses on the most important questions of philosophy of physics, offering a sufficiently concise and clear treatment of the issues to lead the interested reader through the sometimes labyrinthian paths taken by the central debates.