Relativity Meaning
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Physics, Information, and Meaning
Author: David E. Conner
language: en
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Release Date: 2026-03-25
What is the essence of life? Human experience can be viewed as a series of choices, purposive activities, and emotional states. Even our most trivial actions are prompted by some goal. Our experience also includes emotions—joy, sadness, pleasure, anxiety, and so on. Even boredom is a type of emotion. But what is the meaning of all this? Those who know anything about science are likely familiar with the idea that reality is based ultimately on particles and physical forces. Modern scientific worldviews seem to offer no explanation for decisions, goals, feelings, and meanings. This book argues against the materialistic-mechanistic-reductionistic response to science. Physics itself—especially special relativity and quantum mechanics—can be interpreted in ways that support, rather than negate, humanity’s experience of choices, values, and meanings. The process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and others is introduced as a useful tool. However, Whitehead’s thought is presented not as a preexisting philosophy that is imported to the interpretation of science, but as a set of ideas that Whitehead derived from his own knowledge of relativity and quantum theory. The book’s final two chapters offer ideas about religion that are compatible with the worldview that has been described.
Relativity and the Dimensionality of the World
Author: Vesselin Petkov
language: en
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Release Date: 2007-10-08
All physicists would agree that one of the most fundamental problems of the 21st century physics is the dimensionality of the world. In the four-dimensional world of Minkowski (or Minkowski spacetime) the most challenging problem is the nature of the temporal dimension. In Minkowski spacetime it is merely one of the four dimensions, which means that it is entirely given like the other three spacial dimensions. If the temporal dimension were not given in its entirety and only one constantly changing moment of it existed, Minkowski spacetime would be reduced to the ordinary three-dimensional space. But if the physical world, represented by Minkowski spacetime, is indeed four-dimensional with time being the fourth dimension, then such a world is drastically different from its image based on our perceptions. Minkowski four-dimensional world is a block Universe, a frozen world in which nothing happens since all moments of time are given ‘at once', which means that physical bodies are four-dimensional worldtubes containing the whole histories in time of the three-dimensional bodies of our everyday experience. The implications of a real Minkowski world for physics itself and especially for our world view are enormous. The main focus of this volume is the question: is spacetime nothing more than a mathematical space (which describes the evolution in time of the ordinary three-dimensional world) or is it a mathematical model of a real four-dimensional world with time entirely given as the fourth dimension? It contains fourteen invited papers which either directly address the main question of the nature of spacetime or explore issues related to it.
Physics Before and After Einstein
It is now a century ago that one of the icons of modern physics published some of the most influential scientific papers of all times. With his work on relativity and quantum theory, Albert Einstein has altered the field of physics forever. It should not come as a surprise that looking back at Einstein's work, one needs to rethink the whole scope of physics, before and after his time. This books aims to provide a perspective on the history of modern physics, spanning from the late 19th century up to today. It is not an encyclopaedic work, but it presents the groundbreaking and sometimes provocative main contributions by Einstein as marking the line between ‘old’ and ‘new’ physics, and expands on some of the developments and open issues to which they gave rise. This presentation is not meant as a mere celebration of Einstein’s work, but as a critical appraisal which provides accurate historical and conceptual information. The contributing authors all have a reputation for working on themes related to Einstein’s work and its consequences. Therefore, the collection of papers gives a good representation of what happened in the 100 years after Einstein’s landmark Annalen der Physik articles. All people interested in the field of physics, history of science and epistemology could benefit from this book. An effort has been made to make the book attractive not only to scientists, but also to people with a more basic knowledge of mathematics and physics.