Suchergebnisse

Extrait de la notice : 'On a dit que Diderot avait collaboré activement au premier ouvrage d'Helvétius : 'De l'Esprit'. Il est difficile et de nier cette collaboration et de la prouver. Il a sans doute fourni des pages. Il a certainement donné le point de départ : 'Le paradoxe', comme il l'appelle, de la sensibilité afférente à la matière en général ; mais il a dû laisser Helvétius employer ces matériaux à sa façon (...)'

Intro -- Preface -- Contents -- Chapter 1: Introduction -- 1.1 Relation to New Mechanism -- 1.2 Structure and Scope of the Book -- 1.2.1 Part I: Mechanisms in History and Today -- 1.2.2 Part II: Mechanisms, Causality, and Multilevel Systems -- 1.2.3 Part III: From Physics to Complexity and Computation -- 1.3 Concluding Remarks -- References -- Part I: Mechanisms in History and Today -- Chapter 2: Mechanisms, Then and Now: From Metaphysics to Practice -- 2.1 Introduction -- 2.2 Old Mechanism: From Metaphysics to Practice -- 2.2.1 Mechanical Models of Gravity -- 2.2.2 Mechanical vs Non-mechanical Explanation -- 2.2.3 Newton Against Mechanism -- 2.3 New Mechanism: From Practice to Metaphysics -- 2.3.1 The Metaphysics of New Mechanism -- 2.3.2 Mechanism in Scientific Practice -- 2.4 Newton Revisited -- References -- Chapter 3: Old and New Mechanistic Ontologies -- 3.1 Introduction -- 3.2 Early Modern Mechanism -- 3.2.1 Monism in Christiaan Huygens -- 3.2.2 Isaac Newton's Dualism -- 3.3 Contemporary Mechanism -- 3.3.1 Monism in Stuart S. Glennan -- 3.3.2 Dualism in Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden, and Carl F. Craver (MDC) -- 3.4 Concluding Comparative Remarks -- References -- Chapter 4: Mechanisms, Explanation and Understanding in Physics -- 4.1 Introduction -- 4.2 Mechanics and Mechanisms -- 4.3 Maxwell's Theory and Poincaré's Theorem -- 4.4 Mechanisms and Quantum Mechanics -- 4.5 Conclusion: Mechanisms, Explanations and Understanding in Physics -- References -- Chapter 5: Mechanistic Explanations Generalized: How Far Can We Go? -- 5.1 Introduction -- 5.2 From Mechanisms to Mechanistic Explanations -- 5.2.1 One-Level and Multi-level Mechanisms -- 5.2.2 Mechanistic Explanations Generalized -- 5.2.2.1 Generalizations Based on Scientific Progress -- 5.2.2.2 Philosophical Generalizations.

The Review summarizes much of particle physics and cosmology. Using data from previous editions, plus 3,062 new measurements from 721 papers, we list, evaluate, and average measured properties of gauge bosons and the recently discovered Higgs boson, leptons, quarks, mesons, and baryons. We summarize searches for hypothetical particles such as supersymmetric particles, heavy bosons, axions, dark photons, etc. All the particle properties and search limits are listed in Summary Tables. We also give numerous tables, figures, formulae, and reviews of topics such as Higgs Boson Physics, Supersymmetry, Grand Unified Theories, Neutrino Mixing, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Cosmology, Particle Detectors, Colliders, Probability and Statistics. Among the 117 reviews are many that are new or heavily revised, including new reviews on Pentaquarks and Inflation. The complete Review is published online in a journal and on the website of the Particle Data Group (http://pdg.lbl.gov). The printed PDG Book contains the Summary Tables and all review articles but no longer includes the detailed tables from the Particle Listings. A Booklet with the Summary Tables and abbreviated versions of some of the review articles is also available. ; The publication of the Review of Particle Physics is supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE–AC02–05CH11231; by the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN); by an implementing arrangement between the governments of Japan (MEXT: Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) and the United States (DOE) on cooperative research and development; by the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences; and by the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN). ; The authors are grateful to Vincent Vennin for his careful reading of this manuscript and preparing Fig. 23.3 for this review. The work of J.E. was supported in part by the London Centre for Terauniverse Studies (LCTS), using funding from the European Research Council via the Advanced Investigator Grant 267352 and from the UK STFC via the research grant ST/L000326/1. The work of D.W. was supported in part by the UK STFC research grant ST/K00090X/1.

AbstractThe concept of "representation" is used broadly and uncontroversially throughout neuroscience, in contrast to its highly controversial status within the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In this paper I first discuss the way that the term is used within neuroscience, in particular describing the strategies by which representations are characterized empirically. I then relate the concept of representation within neuroscience to one that has developed within the field of machine learning (in particular through recent work in deep learning or "representation learning"). I argue that the recent success of artificial neural networks on certain tasks such as visual object recognition reflects the degree to which those systems (like biological brains) exhibit inherent inductive biases that reflect the structure of the physical world. I further argue that any system that is going to behave intelligently in the world must contain representations that reflect the structure of the world; otherwise, the system must perform unconstrained function approximation which is destined to fail due to the curse of dimensionality, in which the number of possible states of the world grows exponentially with the number of dimensions in the space of possible inputs. An analysis of these concepts in light of philosophical debates regarding the ontological status of representations suggests that the representations identified within both biological and artificial neural networks qualify as legitimate representations in the philosophical sense.

In 1835, Auguste Comte pointed out to the fact of ?usurpation? of his term ?social physics? by the Belgian mathematician and statistician A. Quetelet. Quetelet used the term ?social physics? in the title of his book: On Man and the Development of his Abilities or An Experiment in the Research of Social Physics. Therefore, Comte coined a new term ?sociology?. In the 4th volume of his famous work Course, in the chapter ?Dogmatic Part of Social Physics? more precisely in the 47th lesson, under the title: ?A Short Evaluation of the Basic Philosophical Attempts in the Creation of Social Science? written in March 1839, Comte used the word sociologie for the first time.

It is known that diversity matters to improve scientific excellence and that scientific events are important occasions to discuss new ideas and create networks, beyond the fact that it helps to put the work of the scientists in evidence. Hence, increasing diversity in scientific events is crucial to improve their scientific quality and help to promote minorities. In Brazil, important physics scientific events are organized by the Brazilian Physical Society (SBF, in Portuguese), and in this work, some aspects related to the participation of women in these physics events are analyzed from 2005 to 2021. The analysis shows that women's participation has increased over the years, reaching in some areas of Physics the same percentage as the one observed in the SBF community (always below 25%). However, female participation as members of organizing committees and as keynote speakers is always lower. Some proposals are listed to change the current picture of inequality.

The article sketches a critical paradigm for interdisciplinary work that is centred on tension as a highly ambiguous and ultimately deeply paradoxical notion. It highlights that a unifying account of what tension is or a systematic classification of its diverse meanings would risk resolving tensions between different approaches and privileging a particular mode of doing so. Successively focussing on aesthetic, socio-political, and physical tensions, the essay articulates tension rather as a broad umbrella term that is stretched by multi-perspectival articulations, unified through its intensive surface tension, and at the same time full of transformative and generative potentials. In particular, it proposes that tensions between different cultural or disciplinary fields can be made productive by inducing tensions within each field so that different fields can be related to each other on the basis of tension rather than some substantial commonality. ; Christoph F. E. Holzhey, 'Tension In/Between Aesthetics, Politics, and Physics', in Tension/Spannung , ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Cultural Inquiry, 1 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2010), pp. 13–45

Square Kilometre Array: et al. ; arXiv:1810.02680v3 ; The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a planned large radio interferometer designed to operate over a wide range of frequencies, and with an order of magnitude greater sensitivity and survey speed than any current radio telescope. The SKA will address many important topics in astronomy, ranging from planet formation to distant galaxies. However, in this work, we consider the perspective of the SKA as a facility for studying physics. We review four areas in which the SKA is expected to make major contributions to our understanding of fundamental physics: cosmic dawn and reionisation; gravity and gravitational radiation; cosmology and dark energy; and dark matter and astroparticle physics. These discussions demonstrate that the SKA will be a spectacular physics machine, which will provide many new breakthroughs and novel insights on matter, energy, and spacetime. ; A. Racanelli has received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union H2020 Programme under REA grant agreement number 706896 (COSMOFLAGS). Funding for this work was partially provided by the Spanish MINECO under MDM-2014-0369 of ICCUB (Unidad de Excelencia 'Maria de Maeztu'). ; Peer reviewed

Textbooks (LDs) have proved to be sources of research for education. From this perspective, this work seeks to analyse, through a historical approach, what characteristics are present in Physics and Chemistry textbooks from the early 20th century in Brazil in relation to the contents of the structure of matter. To this end, an analytical device based on the theoretical assumptions of French Discourse Analysis is proposed, in order to reconstitute discursive formations imbricated in didactic texts. In the light of Bachelard's epistemology, we also sought to elucidate the conceptions of science and teaching conveyed through the LDs, seeking to contextualise the analysis according to the historical period selected (1900-1930) with regard to the scientific, political and educational scenario of the time. Aimed at science educators, undergraduate students and researchers in the field, this work includes a concise summary of studies already carried out in the period and an analysis of rare books that reveal the relationships between the discourses that make up the textbook as a textual genre.

The ESSνSB project proposes to base a neutrino "Super Beam" of unprecedented luminosity at the European Spallation Source. The original proposal identified the second peak of the oscillation probability as the optimal to maximize the discovery potential to leptonic CP violation. However this choice reduces the statistics at the detector and penalizes other complementary searches such as the determination of the atmospheric oscillation parameters, particularly the octant of θ23 as well as the neutrino mass ordering. We explore how these shortcomings can be alleviated by the combination of the beam data with the atmospheric neutrino sample that would also be collected at the detector. We find that the combination not only improves very significantly these drawbacks, but also enhances both the CP violation discovery potential and the precision in the measurement of the CP violating phase, for which the facility was originally optimized, by lifting parametric degeneracies. We then reassess the optimization of the ESSνSB setup when the atmospheric neutrino sample is considered, with an emphasis in performing a measurement of the CP violating phase as precise as possible. We find that for the presently preferred value of δ∼ - π/ 2 , shorter baselines and longer running time in neutrino mode would be optimal. In these conditions, a measurement better than 14º ∘ would be achievable for any value of the θ23 octant and the mass ordering. Conversely, if present and next generation facilities were not able to discover CP violation, longer baselines and more even splitting between neutrino and neutrino modes would be preferable. These choices would allow a 5 σ discovery of CP violation for around a 60 % of the possible values of δ and to determine its value with a precision around 6 ∘ if it is close to 0 or π ; This work is supported in part by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie SklodowskaCurie Grant agreements 674896-Elusives, 690575-InvisiblesPlus, and 777419-ESSnuSB, as well as by the COST Action CA15139 EuroNuNet. MB, EFM, and SR acknowledge support from the "Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación" (AEI) and the EU "Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional" (FEDER) through the project FPA2016-78645- P; and the Spanish MINECO through the "Ramón y Cajal" programme and through the Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa Program under Grant SEV-2016-0597

AbstractFunctional reductionism characterises inter-theoretic reduction as the recovery of the upper-level behaviour described by the reduced theory in terms of the lower-level reducing theory. For instance, finding a statistical mechanical realiser that plays the functional role of thermodynamic entropy allows to establish a reductive link between thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. This view constitutes a unique approach to reduction that enjoys a number of positive features, but has received limited attention in the philosophy of science. This paper aims to clarify the meaning of functional reductionism in science, with a focus on physics, to define both its place with respect to other approaches to reduction and its connection to ontology. To do so, we develop and explore two alternative versions of functional reductionism, called Syntactic Functional Reductionism and Semantic Functional Reductionism, that expand and improve the basic functional reductionist approach along different lines, and make clear how the approach works in practice. The former elaborates on David Lewis' account, is connected with the syntactic view of theories, employs a logical characterisation of functional roles, and is embedded within Nagelian reductionism. The latter adopts a semantic approach to theories, spells out functional roles mainly in terms of mathematical roles within the models, and is expressed in terms of the related structuralist approach to reduction. The development of these frameworks has the final goal of advancing functional reductionism, making it a fully developed account of reduction in science.