Category: nature of science
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Dialogue with Liam Graham about Emergence
Emergence, a word whose Latin roots are ex = “out” + mergere = “merge, sink”, has 19 different meaning according to Oxford’s English Dictionary. While emergence is also widely used in quantum statistical mechanics, Liam Graham argues in his new book “Physics Fixes All the Facts” that we should abandon it and are better of…
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Dialogue with Matteo Polettini about the second law
The second law of thermodynamics is one of the bedrocks of science. It sticks out due to its defeatism, it has become an integral part of pop culture, economics and politics, and it is constantly mystified because “no one really knows what entropy really is” (J. von Neumann). In this dialogue physicists Matteo Polettini and…