#philosophyofphysics

[philosophiesde]

🌍 “Reality is innocent—it is our concepts that are guilty.” 📖

Quantum physics works perfectly—and yet contradicts our understanding of reality. Particles without properties, states without certainty, measurements that seem to generate facts ⚛️. In a new guest post on my philosophy and science blog, Dr. Bernd Stein proposes an epistemological shift in perspective: 👉 It is not properties that are fundamental, but possibilities of description. 👉 The mathematics of quantum theory does not tell us what the world is like, but under what conditions it becomes determinable. Perhaps the quantum world is not paradoxical at all. Perhaps we just need to think differently about reality 🔍 💬 Feedback welcome at: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2025/12/20/die-realitaet-ist-unschuldig/

[psawomen]

Philosopher of Science Eleanor Knox wins Cushing Prize.

I remember hearing Eleanor Knox give a talk on spacetime, and noticing then the boldness in pushing questions farther, combined with tenacity, rigor, and stamina in exploring different answers to them.  It made a deep impression.  So I thought it very fitting that the Cushing Memorial Prize for 2015, which is awarded for "significant new work by younger scholars in the history and philosophical foundations of modern physics" had just been awarded to her.

 The prize announcement is here: http://reilly.nd.edu/history-and-philosophy-of-science/cushing-prize/2015-winner/ The paper for which the prize was awarded, “Newtonian Spacetime Structure in Light of the Equivalence Principle,” published in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (2014) is open access, and is available here:  http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/10/30/bjps.axt037.full.pdf+html

and her webpage at King's College London is here: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/philosophy/people/staff/academic/knox.aspx

 There are two other things I think worth mentioning, too:  Eleanor is often asked to speak to non-specialist audiences (an example is here "The Curious Case of the Vanishing Spacetime" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8k_2oD66mI , where she was one of four philosophers of science chosen to speak to an audience of members of the public, academics, and scientists.)  And, she recently had a daughter!  Very recently, in fact:  Ada Elizabeth Anne Knox-Rands arrived in April 2015.

[cecilodell-blog]

"Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such an authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they come to be stamped as “necessities of thought,” “a priori givens,” etc. The path of scientific advance is often made impassable for a long time through such errors. For that reason, it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analyzing the long commonplace concepts and exhibiting those circumstances upon which their justification and usefulness depend, how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. By this means, their all-too-great authority will be broken. They will be removed if they cannot be properly legitimated, corrected if their correlation with given things be far too superfluous, replaced by others if a new system can be established that we prefer for whatever reason. " - Albert Einstein