Category: philosophy for physics
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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…
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Physical versus mathematical approximations
Most 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…