Physics And Chance

Author : Lawrence Sklar
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521558815
Total Pages : 458 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Physics and Chance written by Lawrence Sklar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lawrence Sklar offers a comprehensive, non-technical introduction to statistical mechanics and attempts to understand its foundational elements.

Author : David Z Albert
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674020138
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Time and Chance written by David Z Albert and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2003-02-28 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students.

Author : J. Bricmont
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3540449663
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Chance in Physics written by J. Bricmont and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-01-11 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This selection of reviews and papers is intended to stimulate renewed reflection on the fundamental and practical aspects of probability in physics. While putting emphasis on conceptual aspects in the foundations of statistical and quantum mechanics, the book deals with the philosophy of probability in its interrelation with mathematics and physics in general. Addressing graduate students and researchers in physics and mathematics togehter with philosophers of science, the contributions avoid cumbersome technicalities in order to make the book worthwhile reading for nonspecialists and specialists alike.

Author : David Bohm
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 9780812210026
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Causality and Chance in Modern Physics written by David Bohm and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1957 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this classic, David Bohm was the first to offer us his causal interpretation of the quantum theory. Causality and Chance in Modern Physics continues to make possible further insight into the meaning of the quantum theory and to suggest ways of extending the theory into new directions.

Author : Y. M. Guttmann
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521621283
Total Pages : 283 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Concept of Probability in Statistical Physics written by Y. M. Guttmann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-07-13 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A most systematic study of how to interpret probabilistic assertions in the context of statistical mechanics.

Author : Jan von Plato
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521597357
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Creating Modern Probability written by Jan von Plato and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-12 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book the author charts the history and development of modern probability theory.

Author : Klaas Landsman
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319263005
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Challenge of Chance written by Klaas Landsman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-09 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a multidisciplinary perspective on chance, with contributions from distinguished researchers in the areas of biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, genetics, general history, law, linguistics, logic, mathematical physics, statistics, theology and philosophy. The individual chapters are bound together by a general introduction followed by an opening chapter that surveys 2500 years of linguistic, philosophical, and scientific reflections on chance, coincidence, fortune, randomness, luck and related concepts. A main conclusion that can be drawn is that, even after all this time, we still cannot be sure whether chance is a truly fundamental and irreducible phenomenon, in that certain events are simply uncaused and could have been otherwise, or whether it is always simply a reflection of our ignorance. Other challenges that emerge from this book include a better understanding of the contextuality and perspectival character of chance (including its scale-dependence), and the curious fact that, throughout history (including contemporary science), chance has been used both as an explanation and as a hallmark of the absence of explanation. As such, this book challenges the reader to think about chance in a new way and to come to grips with this endlessly fascinating phenomenon.

Author : David Z Albert
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674731263
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book After Physics written by David Z Albert and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here the philosopher and physicist David Z Albert argues, among other things, that the difference between past and future can be understood as a mechanical phenomenon of nature and that quantum mechanics makes it impossible to present the entirety of what can be said about the world as a narrative of “befores” and “afters.”

Author : Yemima Ben-Menahem
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 3642213286
Total Pages : 325 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Probability in Physics written by Yemima Ben-Menahem and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-01-25 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the role and meaning of probability in physical theory, in particular in two of the most successful theories of our age, quantum physics and statistical mechanics? Laws once conceived as universal and deterministic, such as Newton‘s laws of motion, or the second law of thermodynamics, are replaced in these theories by inherently probabilistic laws. This collection of essays by some of the world‘s foremost experts presents an in-depth analysis of the meaning of probability in contemporary physics. Among the questions addressed are: How are probabilities defined? Are they objective or subjective? What is their explanatory value? What are the differences between quantum and classical probabilities? The result is an informative and thought-provoking book for the scientifically inquisitive.

Author : Edwin T. Jaynes
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 9780792302131
Total Pages : 468 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book E.T. Jaynes written by Edwin T. Jaynes and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1989-04-30 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first six chapters of this volume present the author's 'predictive' or information theoretic' approach to statistical mechanics, in which the basic probability distributions over microstates are obtained as distributions of maximum entropy (Le. , as distributions that are most non-committal with regard to missing information among all those satisfying the macroscopically given constraints). There is then no need to make additional assumptions of ergodicity or metric transitivity; the theory proceeds entirely by inference from macroscopic measurements and the underlying dynamical assumptions. Moreover, the method of maximizing the entropy is completely general and applies, in particular, to irreversible processes as well as to reversible ones. The next three chapters provide a broader framework - at once Bayesian and objective - for maximum entropy inference. The basic principles of inference, including the usual axioms of probability, are seen to rest on nothing more than requirements of consistency, above all, the requirement that in two problems where we have the same information we must assign the same probabilities. Thus, statistical mechanics is viewed as a branch of a general theory of inference, and the latter as an extension of the ordinary logic of consistency. Those who are familiar with the literature of statistics and statistical mechanics will recognize in both of these steps a genuine 'scientific revolution' - a complete reversal of earlier conceptions - and one of no small significance.