* David Thouless, a British American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for exploring strange states of matter and using a blend of
physical theory and mathematical insight to create knowledge applicable in computers, electronics and materials science, died April 6 in Cambridge, England.
A proper
physical theory should clearly describe what is there and what it does-- yet standard textbooks present quantum mechanics as a predictive recipe in search of a
physical theory.
General relativity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics: three independent bodies of
physical theory. Hawking combined the first two, and the results looked like the third.
Like Epicurus, this materialism is a
physical theory demystifying traditional morality and religion, which are replaced by hedonism.
This principle, first proposed 40 years ago by physicist Roger Penrose, keeps sacrosanct an idea -- determinism -- key to any
physical theory. That is, given the past and present, the physical laws of the universe do not allow more than one possible future.
(2015b) 'On the Necessity of Including the Observer in
Physical Theory", Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol.
He has won a prestigious PS75,000 Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award to run a project involving the mathematical modelling of a
physical theory proposed to explain the existence of the Higgs boson, said to give matter its substance, or mass.
If one's
physical theory indicates that the best explanation for my own subjective experience, including memories, is that I am a disembodied brain temporarily hallucinating in the void (rather than a real person currently sitting at my desk), that's a problem for one's theory.
But she does briefly discuss black holes' importance in many fundamental aspects of
physical theory today, from their role in creating gravitational waves to their connections with the mysteries of quantum physics.
Sean says, "is intellectually rigorous in that the writing within explores--with originality and insight--the diverse ways that one particular form of scientific knowledge--string theory--becomes cultural, or even personal cosmology." Due to the peculiar yet potent workings of the human mind, a
physical theory about the mechanics of the universe on the smallest of scales transforms into a shared imaginary that connects people not only to that universe, but to each other.
If the relevant body of
physical theory were falsified and replaced with something better, the physicist in learning the new theories, may simultaneously acquire a new way of seeing old events.