W. H. Newton-Smith's "Companion to the Philosophy of Science" is an excellent encyclopedia-style book. I might buy it if it weren't so bulky (the lighter I travel, the better)

Scientific Understanding
Understanding Scientific Understanding is an interesting project. I would like to unify Minsky's notion of "understanding as multiple representations ( Read more... )

Physicists,

Kuhn would say that most of the theorizing you do, whether explaining new phenomena, predicting the result of novel experiments, etc involves reusing tricks from the examples you learned as a student (i.e. exemplars, "puzzle solutions").

Kitcher interprets Kuhn in an unusual way, and has said that ``Science advances our understanding ( Read more... )

Compare "accelerating under constant power ( Read more... )

http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/paradigm.html
par·a·digm (plural par·a·digms ( Read more... )

A couple weeks ago I made a big edit on the Wikipedia article titled "Mathematical_models_in_physics", deleting some stuff that seemed to imply that "mathematics is not always faithful to physics" because of the Banach-Tarski Paradox.

I posted my justification for this here

Also here:
( Read more... )

thread at tdj's about carbon-dating individual human cells (it's a very clever idea):

In discussing the required experimental precision / error, I proposed:
Here's a causation network ( Read more... )

r6 and I discuss his theory that entropy is subjective

I've never been satisfied with the solutions I've seen to Maxwell's Demon.
I take r6's interpretation of entropy as an agent-dependent quantity related to his knowledge, and a measurement of what one can do with this knowledge: knowledge is power. According to his theory, an all-knowing being ( ( Read more... )

Kevin T. Kelly - Simplicity, Truth, and the Unending Game of Science

Kevin Kelly claims to explain why Ockham's razor is useful without resorting to "God was kind enough to make the world simple". Also, check out the brilliant cartoons!

What would you say is the traditional explanation for why Ockham's razor works?

There are two kinds of ways of looking at mathematics... the Babylonian tradition and the Greek tradition... Euclid discovered that there was a way in which all the theorems of geometry could be ordered from a set of axioms that were particularly simple... The Babylonian attitude... is that you know all of the various theorems and many of the ( Read more... )

Last night I introduced myself to my upstairs neighbour at 12:15AM, to friendlyly ask him to turn his music down (especially the bass ( Read more... )