Most experienced physicists have developed an amazing intuition for how to describe physical systems. Sometimes, however, they struggle to convey their intuitive insights to those who don’t share their intuition. This problem can arise, because the methods used to describe physical systems aren’t physical systems themselves; thus, being an expert in applying those methods does not automatically make one an expert in describing how to apply those methods.
In philosophy for physics, we analyze physics and its methods from a philosophical perspective; the goal is to generate insights that are useful for physicists. A philosophical analysis can, for example, clarify a physical concept or deepen our understanding of a physical theory, which can help students with learning, lecturers with teaching, and researchers with communicating. As such a philosophical analysis will be most useful in physics education, in this blog, we mainly focus on topics of standard physics courses. However, we will take a non-standard, philosophical perspective; not to replace, but to complement standard presentations.
Upcoming blog articles
- What is a probability?
- Idealization, overidealization, and regularization
- What is a mass?
- The role of mathematics in physics
Schedule: there is no fixed schedule; new blog articles will appear irregularly.
Published blog articles
- How to make empirical sense of Newton’s second law?Newton’s second law is at the core of classical mechanics. And experienced physicists have no difficulty in applying it. Yet, its logical status remains somewhat unclear. Is it just a definition of force? An actual law of nature? Or a law governing our description of nature? Before we can answer such questions, we first need to know the empirical content of Newton’s second law. To that end, we discuss how to make empirical sense of it. Thereby, we develop a deeper understanding of the central concepts of force and mass and of Newtonian mechanics as a whole. This deeper understanding, ultimately, will help us to also improve our understanding of other physical theories, as we can compare and contrast them to classical mechanics.
- Physical versus mathematical approximationsMost physical systems cannot be described exactly. Thus, making meaningful approximations is a key skill physicists need to develop. However, with approximation methods being rarely discussed explicitly in physics courses, physics students sometimes struggle to understand the intuitively-made approximations of experienced physicists. In this blog post, we discuss two of the main methods for approximations—Taylor expansion and asymptotic expansion—with a focus on their different implications for physics. Explicitly, we find that approximations based on Taylor expansions are improved on the side of mathematics, whereas approximations based on asymptotic expansions are improved on the side of physics. Understanding this qualitative difference, in the long run, will allow us to shed some light on the intuition behind many approximations in physics.