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< Introduction to Philosophy < Introduction to Philosophy:Philosophy of Science

This book is inspired by: Философия науки

This book treats physical science as a way to describe and foresee reality. To do this, we have to see how deeply the concepts space, time and motion have been changed in the last centuries. In these concepts, geometry plays a fundamental role.

The link between physics and geometry (indeed, mathematics in general) is similar to the link between philosophy and history. History always influenced philosophy; philosophers must tackle every day problems in addition to their philosophical theories. Conversely, philosophy influenced history because people make decisions according to what they think is important. Physics uses mathematics to explain reality, so if a mathematical theory is still not developed, it will slow down the development of the physical branches that use it.

Contents 1 Who needs this book? 2 Introduction 2.1 Some suppositions 2.2 References

[edit] Who needs this book?

The main target of this book is people who wants to explore the depth (if any) to which physicists can know reality. The main physical theories will be covered using many examples, and their philosophical consequences consequences will be discussed. We will focus on ideas and not on formalisms, so we will speak a little about mathematics but it will be very simple mathematics and no specific knowledge of mathematics or physics is required to read this book.

[edit] Introduction

We will see how Man sought the simplest hypotheses that could explain the events that happened around him. Analyzing the consequences of his hypotheses he built theories that helped him to build new tools and make new experiments. And to explain the results of the experiments he needed new and (in most cases) more complex hypotheses.
Examples of very simple hypotheses are:

• time is absolute: we can always say if two events happened at the same time or not;
• processes are local: there is no link between events that happen at big distances;
• we can measure something without changing it;
• all deterministic systems will reach a periodic behavior after a sufficient amount of time: periodic behaviors are for example seasons or the swing being moved by somebody.

Through this book we will see theories where these hypotheses are confuted. Some confutations will be based on real experiments, when outcomes cannot be explained by the old theories; other confutations are based on mind experiments where we see that our theories have contradictions.
Some people say that scientific discovery will be an endless process, some people say that one day we will discover everything that could be discovered. Nobody knows who is right.

[edit] Some suppositions

Before going on, we need to agree on some things.
There exist an external reality independent from the observer, otherwise there is nothing to discover. Fichte supposed that everything was just our representation, in other words all our feelings are just our imagination. In this case there would be no reason for Science to exist.
The reality can be known by men by experiments. This implies that reality con be modified by men, otherwise almost no experiment could be done.
Mind can understand some aspects of reality and generalize the aspects it has understood.
As reality is very complex, only some aspects of it can be caught by mind. There is progress when it is understood what aspects are important in which situations.

[edit] References

• Schiller, Christoph. Motion Mountain.www.motionmountain.net
• Penrose, Roger. The Road to Reality. This book is mainly about the interaction between mathematical physics and reality. The intended audience is the layman, but as some mathematical concepts are explained with few words, we advice it mainly to who already knows university level mathematics.