فلسفة علم الفيزياء: مقدمة قصيرة جدًّا

Very Short Introductions #668

by David Wallace, إبراهيم سند أحمد (مترجم), الزهراء سامي (مراجعة)

تُعنى فلسفة علم الفيزياء بدراسةِ أعمقِ نظريات الفيزياء الحديثة — ومن أبرزها نظريةُ الكَم ونظرياتُنا عن الزمان والمكان والتناظر والفيزياء الحرارية — وآثارِها الغريبة على المفاهيم الفلسفية؛ فالفَهم الأعمق لهذه النظريات يساعد الفيزياء من خلال تمهيد الطريق أمام وضْعِ نظرياتٍ وتطبيقاتٍ جديدة، كما يساعد الفلسفةَ من خلال استكشافِ ما ينبغي أن يطرأ على نظرتنا للعالَم من تغيير، في ضوءِ ما نتعلَّمه من الفيزياء. ويتناول هذا الكتاب من سلسلة «مقدِّمة قصيرة جدًّا» الموضوعات الأساسية في فلسفة الفيزياء عبر ثلاثة محاور رئيسة؛ المحور الأول هو طبيعة الزمان والمكان والحركة، والمحور الثاني هو ظهورُ سلوكٍ غير انعكاسي في الميكانيكا الإحصائية، والمحور الثالث يناقش نظريةَ الكَم التي تُعَد بمثابة الأساسِ للجزء الأكبر من الفيزياء الحديثة؛ وبالرغم من ذلك لا تزال غامضةً حتى يومنا هذا.

Genres: Philosophy, Physics, Science, Nonfiction, Stem

140 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2021

About the author

David Wallace was born in San Rafael, California, in 1976, but has been resident in the UK since 1977. He studied theoretical physics at Oxford University from 1994-2002, but upon realising his research interests lay mostly in conceptual and foundational aspects of physics, he moved across into philosophy of physics. For the last six years he has been Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy of Science at Balliol College, Oxford. He holds PhDs in physics and in philosophy, and his research interests span a wide range of issues on the boundary between philosophy and physics: symmetry and the gauge principle, the direction of time, the structure of quantum field theory, and of course the interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Reviews

[Charles]

Nope, still don’t get it.

[Tom Brennan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The topics covered are genuinely really interesting. The parts on the twin paradox and interference were both super cool and exactly the kinds of things I was hoping would be in here. I’ve seen some reviews saying this book is way too basic, but given it's meant to be a very short introduction, I thought it was plenty dense. As an entry point into some pretty complex topics, I think it did exactly what it set out to do.

[Miguel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of my issues spring from this being a very short introduction. A lot of it felt like bulletpoints or definitions. I guess having some previous exposure to much of these quandaries on a deeper level means this book wasn’t meant for me.

I often felt like a lot of the examples used for the relativity of simultaneity, interference patterns, and the Bell Inequality weren’t the best.

I did appreciate some things this made me think about though. I liked the reminder that the zero G on the ISS isn’t because gravity is weaker there but rather it’s because everything is in the same state of freefall. I also appreciated the juxtaposition of the geometry first vs dynamics first paradigms in special relativity. Geometry first: spacetime intervals being longer is what is interpreted as time dilation. Dynamics first: time dilation is a description of how processes in the world are, and geometry is a tool to codify this.

I particularly enjoyed some of the statistical mechanics ideas, since this is a field I don’t have much experience with. I liked how he really drove down how weird probability really is. I also appreciated how he tackled the idea of reductionism and emergence. Macroscopic entities can’t all be said to reduce to microscopic entities due to the issues of reversibility. A view of all the particles in a room can lead to a description of the reversible. However, the mixing of coffee in the macroscopic world is not reversible. Therefore, its irreversibility is an emergent property.

The QM discussion just drove down even more that I’m still an Everettian.

[Ged]

I have a hard time rating this book. Throughout reading it, I often found myself going back and forth thinking that this book would have been better appreciated and understood by someone who has intimately dealt with the physics-side of the topics discussed vs. by someone who hasn’t. But that may just be because of the difficulty of having to explain physics with minimal math (friends who know me know especially well that I am biased toward a “mathematical treatment” of physics, or none at all).

This is not to say that I prefer to not have read the book in the first place though. I did learn a few new things I could not have learned from my training in physics.

I especially loved the first chapter, as I feel that it explains broad concepts in philosophy of physics well to someone already familiar with introductory philosophy of science.

And as for the chapter on gravity, I especially loved the characterization of the “geometry-first” vs. “dynamics-first” approaches to relativity. It’s nice to know the name of the approach I am a part of (geometry-first) but up until this point I have not explicitly identified as an opposing view to the dynamics-first approach. I remember reading the part on how the dynamics-first camp would see the paradoxes as a real problem and just writing on the margins of the book, “fair,” something I would have never ever considered before (I was, and probably still am, albeit a little less now, an avid hater of “paradoxes” when teaching relativity).

The chapter on statistical physics (and QM) was also really cool (less cool for QM but still nice), since most of my exposure with statmech and QM in physics are mostly the “shut up and calculate” kinds.

Judging the book in its entirety though and it’s probably just my bias toward math-heavy physics talking, I do think this book could have used a lot more math. But then again, it wouldn’t have been a “very short introduction” wouldn’t it? I guess this whole review is more about me wondering if it is even possible to write an “introductory” book on philosophy of physics the way I like it, with the physics clearly being explained by math, and is less an objective review of the book.

All things considered, I did enjoy reading the book. I feel that I know a lot more about philosophy of physics than what I knew before reading this book, even tho it’s largely making explicit things I have already been exposed to, albeit in a different form and in varying degrees. And in philosophy, I think that already counts for a lot.

[bojana · Rating 5 out of 5]

in recent years, i sometimes get this feeling that i wish my career took me into philosophy of phisics, or something approaching it.
we had philospohy of physics as an exam, maybe even a two-term thing, in the 4th year of the undergrad. it was the most ridiculous exam ever, i remember nothing from it, and i don't have the courage to check if anything changed. i have this bug in the back of my brain that tells me that maybe, just maybe, if this was different, i might get interested in this stuff when it mattered, and not as an assistant research professor :)
i respect david wallace a lot, i think he is the best person to write about this subject. it is "a very short introduction", but he manages to cover the important subfields and can point one into specifics. the suggested reads are also great.

[Desollado · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I always comment, some books of this series state themselves as non - complicated approachs, The problem with "Philosophy of Physics" is that it can't avoid some of the most counter intuitive subects known to humanity. As I always comment, some books of this series state themselves as non - complicated approachs, The problem with "Philosophy of Physics" is that it can't avoid some of the most counter intuitive subects known to humanity.

[Jamey Yadon · Rating 4 out of 5]

He nails it! A very short, but effective, introduction to the topic

[Stone · Rating 2 out of 5]

Caricature (details shouldn’t be taken too literally)
Auxiliary Hypotheses (still valid contender)
Pervasive Mathematical Anomaly (discrepancy between the predicted and measured values)
Underdetermination (same result, different theories)
Falsification
Inertial reference frame
Spacetime
Reductionism
Light
Time dilation
Length contraction
Twin paradox
Emergence

Notes

The philosopher Daniel Dennett defines philosophy as what we do when we don’t know what questions to ask; when we understand enough to work out what the questions are and can start answering them, a new science buds off from philosophy.

If the theory fails the test, it’s falsified: throw it out, and go back to step (1). If it passes, keep testing it in different ways. Call this approach falsificationism. Unlike enumerative induction, it is a caricature of the scientific method—and, like all caricatures, it captures some of the central features of its subject matter, but its details shouldn’t be taken too literally, and if they are, it is likely to mislead.

So: two apparent episodes of falsification; with hindsight, one was a triumph of Newtonian gravity, falsifying not the theory but our auxiliary assumptions about the solar system and leading to the discovery of the eighth planet; the other was a true falsification, explained by the wholesale replacement of Newtonian gravity with a new and improved theory. But only with hindsight can these distinctions be drawn: there was nothing inherently unreasonable about the idea of Vulcan, and no improvement in scientific method could or should have told scientists not to postulate it.

It has been known since the early 1980s that there is a discrepancy between the predicted and measured values. (And replacing Newtonian gravity with Einstein’s general relativity makes no difference here: the anomaly persists.) Similar anomalies showed up in larger-scale observations of entire clusters of galaxies.

the universal nature of gravitation tells us that inertial structure is not given as an unchanging, Universe-wide background, but rather is determined locally, by the distribution of matter.

Electrons, or quarks, or black holes, cannot be directly observed—that is, you can’t see, hear, or touch them—but (say scientific realists) we still have good reason to think that there are such things.

Why is it a zero-gravity environment? Far too often one hears that it’s because there is no gravity in space (presumably because it’s far away from the Earth’s gravitational pull). This is nonsense. The Earth has a radius of about 6,400 kilometres; the International Space Station orbits about 500 kilometres up; the gravitational pull of the Earth at 6,900 kilometres distance is scarcely less than at 6,400 kilometres. A better way to understand why astronauts don’t experience gravity is that everything in an orbiting spacecraft is moving freely under gravity, at the same rate: the astronauts, their possessions, and the walls of the spacecraft itself. So gravity does indeed pull the astronaut towards the wall of the spacecraft, but it also pulls the wall of the spacecraft away from the astronaut, and to exactly the same degree. Hence the better name for ‘zero gravity’: free fall.

Sound waves travel at the speed of sound, no matter how fast the source of the sound might be going.
(hmm)

If physics is the science that other things reduce to—if physics, whatever its relation to the other sciences, is the field of science that studies matter on the smallest and most fundamental scales—then considerations of emergence and reduction at first glance look irrelevant to physics itself. But the reality is that only a small part of physics is really concerned with studying ‘the most fundamental scales’. Most systems physicists study—atomic nuclei, metals, plasmas, climates, galaxies—are themselves complicated, larger-scale systems whose relations to lower-level physics are complex and indirect. And so understanding reduction—and, more generally, the relation between theories at different levels—is actually a key conceptual issue for physics, and for philosophers of physics. We will see that even within physics, reduction is a subtle matter, requiring entirely new concepts beyond the basic dynamical laws of physics—concepts of irreversibility and probability. Both entered physics in the 19th century, but both remain contested to this day.
So really, we should think about physics not as giving a single description of the world, but as giving a plethora of descriptions, of different systems, at different scales.

Time dilation—In a moving system, all the physical processes slow down relative to those same processes in a stationary system. In particular, a clock that kept good time when stationary will run slow if it is in motion.

Time dilation is a directly observable prediction of relativity. Because the speed of light is so fast, it is most pronounced in the behaviour of sub-atomic particles (the only things we can realistically accelerate to speeds close to light speed). Many of these particles are unstable—they decay into other particles—and they have characteristic decay times, which makes them clocks of a sort. Relativity predicts that these decay times slow down, the faster the particles are moving, and exactly this is observed, both in human-built particle accelerators and in the natural experiments that occur when fast-moving cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere. The predicted time dilation can be significant—a factor of ten in cosmic-ray experiments, for example—and experiments exactly reproduce those predictions. Large time dilations for massive objects are harder to produce, but modern atomic clocks are so accurate that they can measure even the tiny time dilations caused by putting the clock in an airliner. Again, the experiments reproduce the predictions.

Length contraction—A moving object shrinks (in the direction of motion) compared to the same object when stationary. In particular, a stationary measuring rod will be shorter in motion than it was at rest.

Here’s a different way to describe that same method. Suppose that I send a signal to you and you immediately bounce it back to me. When the signal gets back to me, my watch reads 12:00:20 (independent of any synchrony rule). You need to set your watch so that the time it reads at the moment of bouncing is exactly half way between the time on my watch when the signal left (12:00:00) and the time when it got back (12:00:20)—that is, you should set it to 12:00:10. That half-way choice guarantees that we record the light as moving at the same speed on the way out as on the way back.

The past (on this way of thinking) is fixed; the future is yet to come and so is open; the present is on the edge of transition between future and past; as time flows, the past constantly grows and the future recedes.

system has an attractor region if there is some state (or some collection of states that doesn’t contain all the states) such that whatever the system’s initial state, eventually it ends up at the attractor state(s) and then stays there indefinitely. (In statistical mechanics, attractors are very often called ‘equilibrium states’, and the process of evolving towards one is called ‘equilibration’.)

Roughly speaking: systems are recurrent if and only if they are reversible; they have attractors if and only if they are irreversible.

We can now see why irreversibility poses a problem for statistical mechanics. The microscale physics of systems—like the physics of the individual particles in the dilute gas—appears reversible, while the physics at larger scales—like the physics of the gas at the fluid scale—is normally irreversible.

In other words, if a system is recurrent, any coarse-graining of that system must also be recurrent.

However we look at it: irreversible large-scale physics could not possibly be emergent from revesible microscopic physics.

What these arguments tell us is that coarse-graining can’t be the whole story: there must be some additional assumptions or conditions added to the microscopic, reversible physics in order for irreversibility to turn up at a coarse-grained level. But to understand what it might be, we need to consider the second feature of high-level physics that is missing from the low-level description: probability.

suppose we actually try to set up a system and then watch how it evolves—we prepare it so it has a certain coarse-grained description, but we lack the experimental precision to fix its exact microstate. So we’re ignorant about that microstate, and the uniform probability measure is a natural way to represent that ignorance. And if we want to predict the system’s state at later times, the methods of statistical mechanics are the best we can do. But it would obviously be folly to try to predict the system’s state at earlier times using those methods.

Shine a laser at a light detector, and measure the strength of the signal as the power of the beam is reduced. For a while, the result is simple: just a smooth decrease in the amount of laser light detected. But there is a threshold energy where, if light is not detected at that energy, it is not detected at all. Turning the laser power down, beyond that point, doesn’t mean weaker and weaker detection: it means that detection happens less and less often, but each time it does happen that same, fixed, amount of energy is detected.
(wow. sounds like a detector problem though.)

If we adopted the probabilistic reading of the quantum state (where the Schrödinger cat state just represents the probability of the cat being alive or dead), it would be trivial, corresponding only to our update of information when we actually discovered whether the cat survived.
(exactly)

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

You may know that the term "philosophy" once referred to all scientific inquiry. As each field became more detailed, differentiated, and empirical, it got spun off into something separate. So the philosophy of physics is concerned not with the questions physics tries to answer, but with questions so basic they are generally assumed away.

Note that this book is not about philosophy of science, which covers the broader questions of how scientific knowledge is produced and validated, but focuses specifically on questions coming from physics.

Such as: what is motion?

Man, some of this is over my head, but the basic idea is that defining something as "in motion" requires a neutral frame of reference, something the universe does not provide, so the best we can talk about is relative motion. The idea of relativity goes back to Galileo. If you're locked up in the hull of a ship, he wrote, unable to see outside, you cannot tell if the ship is still or moving.

Similarly, Einstein called it the happiest moment of his life when he realized that in free fall it would seem like there is no gravity. (And in fact Newton implicitly knew this when he discussed the force of the earth and moon on each other, while ignoring the sun.)

People commonly say that in space there is "no gravity", which is nonsense. The force of Earth's gravity at the ISS is almost as strong as on earth, but the point is that that force is acting equally strongly on you and the space station itself, so there is no relative gravity.

A bullet fired from a moving gun will move faster than one fired from a stationary gun. But that isn't true for sound waves, which always move at the speed of sound, regardless. Why is this? Doesn't it break the symmetry of relativity? The answer is that sound moves through a medium (air) which breaks that symmetry. Just like the fact that balls fall down on earth doesn't violate the fact that there's no direction in space - the rule is locally violated, but that's fine. If all of space was filled with air we might have to reconsider if relativity is true if we can't measure it anywhere. But it isn't.

Light is weird in that it's a wave that always moves at the same speed whether the observer is moving or not. Does this mean light moves through a medium, like sound? At first scientists hypothesized one (the ether). However Einstein found the answer is much weirder: the speed of light is always constant, but time and space are flexible relative to it. Calling it the speed of light is misleading: it is more like the universal exchange rate between space and time, and this is the limit observed by light, as well as other massless forces such as gravity.

Another chapter discusses philosophical paradoxes of statistical mechanics: higher order emergent properties (the behaviour of a fluid follows a set of rules which cannot be derived from the rules governing its individual particles at the microscopic level), and the paradox of reversibility (the arrow of time points one way: when we see a video of a pile of sand collapsing we know that it isn't being played backwards).

Quantum mechanics is obviously the high point of this field, the part of physics most in need of philosophers. QM presents a set of mathematical tools that fit the empirical data but simply make no sense. One pragmatic response to this is the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation, jokingly summarised as "shut up and calculate". And then on the baroque end you have Everett's Many-worlds Hypothesis, the idea that when two contradictory states seem to coexist until being viewed, each is true in its own world, and we live in an endlessly branching multiverse.

Some are happy to solve the equations and move on, without being too bothered by the paradoxes. I was reminded of Richard Feynman's quip that "philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds", to which a philosopher replied: ornithology would be pretty useful to birds, if they could understand it...

[Callan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book starts with a rapid recap on some of the background ideas in philosophy of science putting a particular emphasis on two important points: Firstly, the theory-laden nature of scientific observations - the very instruments that we use to make measurements themselves happen to rely on our theories as do those quantities that we are measuring. As such, some clean division between the empirical and theoretical becomes doubtful (and Popper's vision of science as falsification faces serious challenges). Secondly, the underdetermination of a theory by the evidence, that is to say, that two theories A and B may not be able to be distinguished by current (or indeed future) empirical predictions and yet they may have profoundly differing ontological commitments.

This gives a point of departure for the rest of the chapters which cover what one might expect from such a book - the distinctly philosophical questions arising from Newtonian mechanics, special (and a small amount of general) relativity, statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics. All of these are beautifully explained with Wallace demonstrating a particular knack for finding the quintessential _philosophical_ challenges that these theories present.

Wallace is an expert in the philosophy of quantum mechanics and as one would expect this is ably covered (though perhaps this is also the most well-trodden territory in the popularizing press). The highlight for me though, was Wallace's beautiful discussion of the very meaning of Newton's first law. The way in which the very the idea of movement leads inevitably to a discussion of inertial frame, which in turn moves us towards absolute space - a fundamentally _unempirical_ part of the theory - and later to notions of spacetime.

A very pleasant read, and a breezy but forceful introduction to what philosophy has to contribute to physics.

[Jason Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel a bit ambivalent about rating this because I think I misunderstood what this book was going to be about. I thought that this was going to explore the philosophical implications of the latest discoveries and problems within the world of Physics, or perhaps the various ways in which this has changed over time. Instead, it was more of a general overview of the development of some major ideas in Physics such as relativity and quantum mechanics, and how they shifted the way scientists study and interpret the physical world.

In a sense, it is a history of how physics has been approached by physicists over time and how they have grappled with the tensions between understanding reality and making predictions within it. There is a lot of philosophical debate about how to engage with Physics as a discipline because of the many theoretical paradoxes that have been uncovered over the last few centuries, and this book does a good job at summarizing these. But it doesn't say a lot about how it affects our lives itself.

I actually expected the book to start exactly where it eventually ends, with the introduction of the different interpretations on how to make sense of quantum mechanics through leading theories such as instrumentalism or Everett's Many-Worlds Interpretation, etc. I thought it would explain them, then examine how these then influence our long history of ideas in Philosophy as a whole. Instead, it was more about the history of the paradigmatic shifts of perspective within the Physics world. Still, it was informative and worth the read, though I'm still craving the book I was expecting to find.

[. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Проспах средната част на книгата.
Не съм физик за да разбера детайлите, а повечето примери са ми познати.

Нещо което не мога да разбера и нз кой да попитам

Като ще се мери спинът на електрон например. Той може да е горе или долу.

И в 50% от случаите е горе, 50 - долу.

Защо физиците просто не приемат, че ако да кажем живеем в симулация - игра тип GTA и съзнанията ни (душите ни) са се логнали да играят в нашия персонаж (това тяло), а главен админ на симулацията е Господ, какъв е проблема главния админ като е писал програмата просто да е казал на този електрон при измерване номер 6251718361718272 секстилиона този Ко кретен електрон ще е със спин ГОРЕ, а в следващото измерване номер 625.....73 ще е със спин Долу.

Смис защо се бяха от физическия детерминизъм.

Впрочем аз съм ако убеждения съм да кажем екстра материалист.

Вярвам във всичко което вярват материалистите, дори най-хардкор материалистите, просто вярвам и в още неща.Волята,съзнанието, идеите, мислте за мен не са материали.

[Frank Maybusher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, Wallace's book was a good discussion on multiple aspects of the philosophy of physics. However, I have a few issues with its content. For one, Wallace's explanation of the Special theory of relativity was an excessively convoluted one for the subject. I didn't feel that the two given explanations for the Twin Paradox were clear and they, too, seems overly convoluted and difficult to follow.

One issue I had with the book's content was a very brief mention of general relativity. General relativity should be a vital philosophical lesson on the nature of space and time, yet little to no discussion was made of it.

Lastly, even though chapter 4 discussed the philosophy of statistical mechanics, not a mention of the word "entropy" was made anywhere. It would have been nice to relate its concepts with those of the direction of time.

However, outside of these gripes, I felt the rest of the philosophical treatment of physics were satisfyingly covered.

[Anastasia Bizyayeva · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really good foundation for the basic ideas in philosophy of physics (though quite honestly, the best thing about this was the foundation of actual physics ideas. I have to admit i didn't understand everything, and definitely need to re-read this, but with any complicated ideas it's like pushing over a fridge - you have to give it a couple of swings before it really connects.

I particularly liked how this book, much like all in the series, gives an overview of how arguments have evolved, and how the author takes a stance of what he thinks is the most compelling theory and why, but actively noting that he's presenting the reasons for his assent rather than presenting an objective truth. All very clear and honest

[Felipe Aleixo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wallace's book is a fairly comprehensive introduction to the central challenges in the intersection of philosophy and physics. The read is overall engaging and difficult concepts are explained well. It sometimes feels very dense, so I personally thought it was best to reread sections as I worked through them.

In case it is informative, I have a solid background in physics but limited exposure to philosophy of science, which made it a challenging but insightful read. I particularly understood special relativity a bit better and learned how to approach the philosophical nature of physics in a more formal way.

[Dayton Martindale · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish material such as this had been integrated into my own undergrad physics education. Mostly accessible, although at times too dense or too quick (I imagine even moreso for someone who didn’t major in astrophysics, although I am pretty rusty). It felt more like opening a door than a self-contained overview by itself. But with a subtitle “a very short introduction,” opening a door is pretty much what was promised, and I enjoyed it.

[Alina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant as an introduction to Philosophy of Physics, giving a tease of several areas of lively discussion, deep enough to irk your interest, but curt enough to leave you wanting for more and keep to the short format. I found Wallace's illustration of Bell's Inequalities quite nice and approachable, and I do believe it has allowed me to see to what extent non-locality seems quite inescapable (more than I thought!)

[Logan Carter · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was - as intended - a very short introduction to the philosophy of physics. There were sections where Wallace was admittedly terse due to the length constraint. He was still able to brush over a wide range of problems in philosophy of physics. Also he has the same name as the guy from The Office so that’s cool.

[Soni ni Msomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this, though due it's condensed nature ( and the relativity section and the analysis of inertial frames) it was sometimes difficult to read. Loved how he showed the fundamental incompatibility of modern physics. Great addition, I think I'll thoroughly read some statistical mechanics as that was the easiest to follow. Great read nonetheless

Physics book 2/52

[Mustafa Alsinan]

الكتاب يعطيك مقدمة في فلسفة الفيزياء . لا تغرك "مقدمة قصيرة جدا"، فيه مفاهيم و مصطلحات فيزيائية/فلسفية صعبة حتى لو درست الفيزياء في الجامعة لكن ما تطرقت لميكانيكا الكم -مثلي-.
يفضل يكون عندك خلفية جيدة عن الفيزياء قبل ما تبدأ فيه لأن الكاتب يفترض معرفتك الجيدة.
استمتعت حقيقة و انصدمت بكمية التداخل الكبير بين الفيزياء و الفلسفة. حتى يومنا هذا الفيزياء محكومة بالفلسفة من جوانب كثيرة.

[Josh Hedgepeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5 stars.

an intriguing look at the philosphy of science coupled with some foundational concepts. It is sadly esoteric and overly academic. it is also extremely short, which makes its discussions and reviews seem too brief.

[ani · Rating 4 out of 5]

a thoroughly solid introduction to philosophy of physics. i merely wish i had read this a year prior. (let's also geek out about the fact that i've been in a conversation at a pub with david wallace. unfortunately, it was so goddamn loud that i could barely hear a thing that man said. )

[Roy Kenagy]

RK Nook

[Kai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could be a bit more introduction-y. Considering that was what it was marketed as, good read none the less.

[michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

For a very short introduction, I languished. Approachable and digestible it was not.

[Steve Lu · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was not an introduction. It felt more like a general overview of the philosophy of physics from a non-laymans perspective. It was too technical to serve as an introduction to the subject.

[Ryan McKenzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mind-boggling stuff.

[أحمد · Rating 2 out of 5]

محاولة لطرح بعض التساؤلات حول فلسفة الفيزياء وبعض الأسئلة الجوهرية حول أسس النظريات الفيزيائية وربط العلم بالفلسفة في تلك الأسس ، والتدرج بين النظريات الرئيسية في علم الفيزياء ونقاشها.

[Fedde · Rating 3 out of 5]

Technical, but very good!

[Nadia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not enough philosophy.