A physicist probes the metaphysical

A Call for the Structured Physicist Report.

Categories for the practising physicist

In this chapter we survey some particular topics in category theory in a somewhat unconventional manner. Our main focus will be on monoidal categories, mainly symmetric ones, for which we propose a physical interpretation. Special attention is given to the category of sets and relations, posetal categories, diagrammatic calculi, strictification, compact categories, biproduct categories and abst...

A nuclear physicist on the lattice

Nuclear and lattice physicists share several topics of common interest, like hadronic masses, electroweak form factors and structure functions of hadrons. The main physics issues that a new collaboration between a nuclear physicist and the lattice group of the SPQcdR collaboration is going to address, are summarized and preliminary results obtained for meson and baryon masses are presented. The...

A Physicist Looks at Biology

A mature physicist, acquainting himself for the first time with the problems of biology, is puzzled by the circumstance that there are no "absolute phenomena" in biology. Everything is time bound and space bound. The animal or plant or micro-organism he is working with is but a link in an evolutionary chain of changing forms, none of which has any permanent validity. Even the molecular species ...

Metaphysical Minimalism

Properties and facts play a central role within metaphysics, yet there is no widely accepted account of what constitutes a property or a fact. Traditional conceptions of these metaphysical notions raise serious philosophical puzzles, making the existence of each seem dubious. Drawing on the minimalist theory of truth, I argue in favor of a minimalist conception of properties and facts. A minima...