The Philosophy of Physics (The Evolution of Modern Philosophy)

Rating:
Summary: A comprehensive survey
Review: This is an outstanding book about the conceptual development of modern theoretical physics, from Newton to Quantum mechanics, and its philosophical implications. The general slant of the work is mainly historical and philosophical, but it also makes extensive use of mathematics (calculus and vector spaces). A summary of the contexts may be in order here.

The first chapter provides some background to Newtonian physics. The second, discusses Newton's concepts of mass, force, space, time and gravitation, and finishes with a technical section on Lagrange's analytical formulation of mechanics. The next chapter is strictly philosophical and offers an assessment of Kant's contribution to philosophy of nature in his Critique of Pure Reason. The chapter devoted to the 19th. Century deals successively with Non Euclidean geometries, field theories, and thermodynamics. It also reserves a long section for the work of the scientists-philosophers: Whewell, Peirce, Mach, and Duhem. The chapter on relativity stresses the geometrical approach, providing a detailed account of Minkoski's spacetime. It follows a review of the philosophical problems of special relativity, such as conventionality of simultaneity or the twin's paradox, and briefer sections on general relativity and relativistic cosmology. The chapter on quantum mechanics is quite technical and a bit tortuous. It begins with the older formalism of matrix and wave mechanics, and then it presents the standard Hilbert space formalism. There is a thorough analysis of philosophical problems, including the EPR argument, the measurement problem, hidden variables theories and quantum logic.

The last chapter contains general philosophical reflections on the nature of physical theories. The author subscribes to the so called estructuralist view of theories, an approach associated, among others, with the names of P. Suppes and J. Sneed in the US, and W. Stegmuller and W. Balzer in Germany. According to this conception, a physical theory is not a system of statements that intend to be true -or approximately true- of the physical world. Physical theories are rather concepts or predicates, which are true or false of a family of, purported models. These models, in turn, are idealized representations of physical systems or aspects of the physical world.

A final appendix provides the required definitions of higher mathematical concepts, such as vector spaces, Hilbert spaces, lattices, and topology. It is a very good refresher for the reader with enough mathematical background, but, on my view, it is too brief and compact for those who want to learn these topics from the scratch. The thirty three-page bibliography is rich and comprehensive, especially on original sources of modern physics in any language (nonetheless, there are some omissions of works quoted in abbreviated form in the footnotes). The scope of the book is really wide and almost complete, but I have missed a section on elementary particle physics.

In conclusion, it is a long and demanding, but not less rewarding, work, in which the reader may learn history, physics, and philosophy at the same time. Although it is not highly technical, its rather abstract style makes it more suitable for graduate level studies in science and philosophy. Strongly recommended for lovers of mathematical physics with a philosophical slant.