- Campuses :
- Twin Cities
- Crookston
- Duluth
- Morris
- Rochester
- Other Locations
Meeting time: 1:30-3:00 pm
Meeting place: Room 2-260 Electrical Engineering/Computer Science (EE/CS) Except December 11, meet in 207 Vincent Hall.
The physics interest group (PIG) reads and discusses works of mutual interest in the history and philosophy of physics. We select readings for a variety of reasons: to keep up on the most exciting developments in the field, to help participants scrutinize literature relevant to their research projects (faculty or graduate student research), to provide feedback on works in progress being written by participants (graduate students, faculty, and Center visitors), to revisit classic articles in the literature, and sometimes just to have fun discussing a topic related to biology.
October 9: Physics pedagogy (1). In preparation for an HSS section on quantum textbooks in which Clayton Gearhart and Michel Janssen will give talks. Selections from David Kaiser (ed.), Pedagogy and the Practice of Science. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005. Scans of parts of the Kaiser book (the intro, the conclusion by David Kaiser and Andrew Warwick, plus the articles by Kaiser, Ito, and Park) are available here (password protected).
October 23: Paul Forman versus Joan Bromberg on the relation between physics research and the military (discussion leader: Maggie Hofius). The readings, Bromberg, Isis 97 (2006) 237-259 and Forman, HSPS 18 (1992) 149-229, are available here (password protected).
November 13: Physics pedagogy (2). Preview of HSS sessions on quantum textbooks, Phoenix, AR, Nov. 19-22 (discussion leaders: Clayton Gearhart and Michel Janssen)
December 11: Physics pedagogy (3). Post mortem of HSS sessions on quantum textbooks.
Next semester PIG will be devoted to the history and philosophy of decoherence in preparation for Seven Pines XIV, "Decoherence versus Entanglement." The central text we will be reading is:
Maximilian Schlosshauer, Decoherence and the Quantum-to-Classical Transition. The Frontiers Collection, Springer, Heidelberg/Berlin (2007, 4th reprint 2009).
See Schlosshauer's home page, for reviews of his book by Anton Zeilinger, Claus Kiefer (a confirmed speaker at SP XIV), and Klaas Landsman (in Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics).
For more information: contact Janet McKernan (mcps@umn.edu) or Michel Janssen (janss011@umn.edu).
February 6: We will discuss the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Emergent Properties.
February 13: We will discuss Don Howard's paper "Reduction and Emergence in the Physical Sciences: Some Lessons from the Particle Physics–Condensed Matter Physics Debate". (PDF)
February 20: We will discuss P. W. Anderson's paper "More Is Different" Science, New Series, Vol. 177, No. 4047. (Aug. 4, 1972), pp. 393-396 and maybe the ten-page article from the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online "Emergence In Physics" written by R. W. Batterman.
February 27: Thomas Nickles, "Two Concepts of Intertheoretic Reduction." (PDF) If there is interest we will also continue our discussion of Anderson, "More is Different," paying particular attention to the technical side of his example.
March 6: Chapters 1 and 2 of Robert Batterman's book The Devil in the Details. (PDF)
March 13: The article by Batterman on "Critical phenomena and breaking drops: Infinite idealizations in physics" Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 36 (2005) 225–244. (PDF)
March 27: Chapters 3 and 4 of The Devil in the Details: Asymptotic Reasoning in Explanation, Reduction and Emergence by Robert W. Batterman, Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0195146476. (PDF)
April 3: Chapter 5 of The Devil in the Details: Asymptotic Reasoning in Explanation, Reduction and Emergence by Robert W. Batterman, Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0195146476. (PDF)
April 10: Chapter 6 of The Devil in the Details: Asymptotic Reasoning in Explanation, Reduction and Emergence by Robert W. Batterman, Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0195146476. (PDF)
April 17: Chapter 8 of The Devil in the Details: Asymptotic Reasoning in Explanation, Reduction and Emergence by Robert W. Batterman, Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0195146476. (Note that we're skipping chapter 7, for the time being at least, in the interest of getting to the end of the book by the end of the semester.) (PDF)
April 24: Gordon Belot's review (PDF) of Batterman's The Devil in the Details, and Batterman's reply to the review (PDF).The Devil in the Details: Asymptotic Reasoning in Explanation, Reduction and Emergence by Robert W. Batterman, Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0195146476.
May 1: There are three papers for discussion this week. One is a general piece by Jaegwon Kim on emergence (PDF), the second is the paper on emergence and quantum entanglement by Hüttemann (PDF) (cited by Batterman), and the third is by Sklar on the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics (PDF).
