You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Lawrence Sklar offers a comprehensive, non-technical introduction to statistical mechanics and attempts to understand its foundational elements.
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.
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.
Examines the main theories of dynamics, their original inception and their evolution over time into contemporary foundational 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....
Philosophical foundations of the physics of space-time This concise book introduces nonphysicists to the core philosophical issues surrounding the nature and structure of space and time, and is also an ideal resource for physicists interested in the conceptual foundations of space-time theory. Tim Maudlin's broad historical overview examines Aristotelian and Newtonian accounts of space and time, and traces how Galileo's conceptions of relativity and space-time led to Einstein's special and general theories of relativity. Maudlin explains special relativity with enough detail to solve concrete physical problems while presenting general relativity in more qualitative terms. Additional topics i...
In nine new essays, distinguished philosophers of science discuss outstanding issues in scientific methodology --especially that of the physical sciences-and address philosophical questions that arise in the exploration of the foundations of contemporary science.
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...