Physics as natural philosophy

Hobbes on natural philosophy as "True Physics" and mixed mathematics.

In this paper, I offer an alternative account of the relationship of Hobbesian geometry to natural philosophy by arguing that mixed mathematics provided Hobbes with a model for thinking about it. In mixed mathematics, one may borrow causal principles from one science and use them in another science without there being a deductive relationship between those two sciences. Natural philosophy for H...

Philosophy of biology versus philosophy of physics.

Not long ago I witnessed a remarkable interchange between two great thinkers: the cosmologist and physicist John Archibald Wheeler, and the philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper. Popper and Wheeler were meeting with a dozen other philosophers and scientists at Schloss Kronberg, the Victorian castle built by Kaiser Wilhelm's mother outside of Frankfurt during the closing years of the nineteenth...

Fusion Physics and Philosophy

The advancement of science and technology normally occurs through evolutionary research and development. These activities and their fruits, knowledge and capabilities, might be very interesting and useful, but they normally do not challenge our overall view of the world. When something revolutionary comes to light, the potential paradigm shift, then we are forced to examine both our knowledge a...

Physics and Philosophy

A winner of the Nobel Prize, Werner Heisenberg was born in 1901 in Wurzberg, Germany. He studied physics at the University of Munich and for his Ph.D. wrote a dissertation on turbulence in fluid streams. Interested in Niels Bohrs account of the planetary atom, Heisenberg studied under Max Born at the University of Gottingen and then, in 1924, went to the Universitets Institut for Teoretisk Fysi...

Philosophy of Physics