Structure And Stability Of Nucleon And Nuclear Systems

Structure And Stability Of Nucleon And Nuclear Systems - Proceedings Of The Predeal International Summer School

The Predeal International Summer School, held at the Institute for Physics and Nuclear Engineering, Bucharest, Romania, is a prestigious scientific event. The school first took place in 1969 and since then it has been held every two years.This year the lectures were given by more than 30 outstanding professors, covering timely subjects in theoretical and experimental nuclear physics. In addition, there were special sessions of contributed papers presenting the most recent results in these domains. The aim of the school was thus two-fold: to give basic information on some hot subjects of research in nuclear physics and to present them with the most recent achievements in these fields. This volume contains the proceedings of the school.

Structure and Stability of Nucleon and Nuclear Systems

Process Realism in Physics

Science should tell us what the world is like. However, realist interpretations of physics face many problems, chief among them the pessimistic meta induction. This book seeks to develop a realist position based on process ontology that avoids the traditional problems of realism. Primarily, the core claim is that in order for a scientific model to be minimally empirically adequate, that model must describe real experimental processes and dynamics. Any additional inferences from processes to things, substances or objects are not warranted, and so these inferences are shown to represent the locus of the problems of realism. The book then examines the history of physics to show that the progress of physical research is one of successive eliminations of thing interpretations of models in favor of more explanatory and experimentally verified process interpretations. This culminates in collections of models that cannot coherently allow for thing interpretations, but still successfully describe processes.