School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 14
-
ItemKnowing what would happen: The epistemic strategies in Galileo's thought experiments(ELSEVIER SCI LTD, 2015-12)While philosophers have subjected Galileo's classic thought experiments to critical analysis, they have tended to largely ignored the historical and intellectual context in which they were deployed, and the specific role they played in Galileo's overall vision of science. In this paper I investigate Galileo's use of thought experiments, by focusing on the epistemic and rhetorical strategies that he employed in attempting to answer the question of how one can know what would happen in an imaginary scenario. Here I argue we can find three different answers to this question in Galileo later dialogues, which reflect the changing meanings of 'experience' and 'knowledge' (scientia) in the early modern period. Once we recognise that Galileo's thought experiments sometimes drew on the power of memory and the explicit appeal to 'common experience', while at other times, they took the form of demonstrative arguments intended to have the status of necessary truths; and on still other occasions, they were extrapolations, or probable guesses, drawn from a carefully planned series of controlled experiments, it becomes evident that no single account of the epistemological relationship between thought experiment, experience and experiment can adequately capture the epistemic variety we find Galileo's use of imaginary scenarios. To this extent, we cannot neatly classify Galileo's use of thought experiments as either 'medieval' or 'early modern', but we should see them as indicative of the complex epistemological transformations of the early seventeenth century.
-
ItemWhy do we find Bohr obscure? Reading Bohr as a philosopher of experiment(Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)Niels Bohr's philosophical view of quantum mechanics has been the subject of extensive scholarship for the better part of five decades. Yet Bohr’s writings have remained obscure, as evidenced by the variety of different scholarly interpretations of his work. In this chapter, I review the historiography of Bohr scholarship, arguing that his meaning has remained elusive because his central preoccupations lay not so much with an interpretation of the quantum-mechanical formalism, which many commentators see as the problem of quantum theory, but rather with the epistemological question of how we can acquire empirical knowledge of quantum objects by means of experiment. Bohr’s doctrine of classical concepts, I argue, is therefore best understood as a philosophy of experiment.
-
ItemBohr and the problem of the quantum-to-classical transition(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017-10-19)
-
ItemOrthodoxy and heterodoxy in the post-war era(Oxford University Press, 2022-05-19)
This chapter focuses on the responses of physicists such as Heisenberg, Pauli, von Neumann, Born, Dirac and Jordan, to the new wave of criticisms of quantum mechanics that emerged after the Second World War. The various attempts to defend the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ took the form of a series of retrospective reconstructions that often went beyond anything we can find in the writings of the late 1920s or 30s. Various interpretational commitments were appropriated, reinterpreted, and, in some cases, even revised. The postwar orthodoxy was a dialectical response to the new challenges it faced in the early 1950s. Yet this dialectic did not lead to a uniform ‘orthodox’ position. It was therefore never an orthodoxy in the true sense of the word. Far from creating a unitary Copenhagen interpretation, the postwar debates had the effect of dramatically expanding the range of interpretations that bore the label “orthodox” or “Copenhagen”.
-
Item
-
ItemH. Dieter Zeh and the History of the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics(Springer International Publishing, 2022-01-01)H. D. Zeh’s early work on the foundations of quantum mechanics and his struggle for recognition provides an instructive case study in the history of the re-emergence of the foundations of quantum mechanics in the latter decades of the twentieth century. In this chapter I examine Zeh’s early work on decoherence and the obstacles he faced in Heidelberg in winning support for his controversial ideas. Zeh’s commitment to the Everett interpretation undoubtedly served as a major obstacle to the wider recognition of his early theoretical contributions to the understanding of decoherence. It was only through the divorcing of interpretation from the study of the dynamics of environment-induced decoherence in the 1980s that Zeh’s work began to attract renewed attention from a number of physicists. This occurred largely through the work of Wojciech Zurek in the 1980s and 90s. However, Zeh’s struggles were not simply the result of his unorthodox views on interpretation. Unlike Zurek, Zeh did not enjoy the luxury of the backing and support of senior colleagues who were sympathetic to his theoretical interests. Whereas Zurek befitted immensely from his association with John Wheeler, whose reputation gave him the freedom to pursue foundational questions, Zeh found himself increasingly marginalized in Heidelberg with little prospect of professional advancement. The story of Zeh’s early struggles thus constitute an important chapter in the history of the foundations of quantum mechanics.
-
ItemQuantum mechanics comes of age(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2022-07)
-
ItemToward a constructivist epistemology of thought experiments in science(SPRINGER, 2014-05-01)
-
ItemThe Shaping of Inquiry: Histories of the Exact Sciences after the Practical Turn(Scientific Research Publishing, Inc., 2015)
-
ItemHeisenberg and the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics The Physicist as Philosopher Conclusion(CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, 2009)