Conveners
Navigating science and philosophy: exploring limits: Tuesday block 1
- Shokoufe Faraji (ZARM)
Description
Physics, the pursuit of understanding the universe's deepest mysteries, confronts its inherent limitations as our knowledge expands. Despite our advancements, there are realms where physics falters, leaving unanswered questions that transcend empirical observation. Pushing the boundaries of science can give rise to challenging philosophical questions, particularly where the visible universe offers insufficient information to fully characterize the laws of physics. Thus, there arises a need for a more comprehensive framework that not only embraces science but also transcends its confines to address ultimate questions. In these uncharted territories, the convergence of science and philosophy becomes imperative. It may be that the complexity of the world surpasses mere scientific explanation, prompting a reassessment of the role of philosophy in scientific development to navigate the frontiers where equations alone fall short, probing the fundamental nature of reality and our place within it.
Considering that many questions once debated by philosophers are now within the domain of physicists. The objective of this parallel session is to explore the open issues pertaining to the aforementioned aspects and to foster collaboration among researchers from diverse disciplines, offering complementary viewpoints on these profound matters, also discuss whether philosophy enhances or impedes physics, and what is the plausible areas that these two can work the best together.
We use the formalism of geometrothermodynamics to associate a Riemannian manifold called equilibrium space to any thermodynamic system. In the case of an ideal gas, we show that quasi-static thermodynamic processes correspond to geodesics in the equilibrium space. Interpreting time as the affine parameter along geodesics, we show that the entropy of the ideal gas is linearly proportional to...
The relationship between philosophy and science has historically been characterized by a deep interconnection between the empirical construction of reality and theoretical frameworks. Physics, as an epistemologically autonomous discipline with its own experimental scientific method, has its roots in philosophical reflection on natural phenomena. However, in today's educational system, science...
In this talk various definitions and realizations of time are considered and compared. These realizations are clocks based on kinematics and dynamics, on electromagnetic and gravitational interactions, on classical and quantum systems. Conditions are stated for which all these time scales coincide. Furthermore, the issue of the synchronization of clocks will be treated. Finally, the importance...
To address the problem of time in canonical quantum gravity, one strategy is to use relational observables which results in the use of reference fields or clocks. We explore various ramifications of these clocks in the classical as well as quantum setting. First we show the way the choice of clocks is tied to gauge fixing and gauge invariant variables in the classical cosmological...
I observe that some of the challenges faced by quantum-gravity research can be traced back to the conceptual tension between relativity and quantum mechanics
