Necessity and Contingency of Physical Theories
8.03.2017
| Date | 8.03.2017 |
|---|---|
| Time | 16:15<br /><small>Apero after the Colloquium</small> |
| Place |
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| Speaker | Olivier Darrigol |
| Area of expertise | Physics |
| Host | Dep. Physik |
| Contact | Graf |
| Abstract | Can we derive physical theories by pure reasoning, without appeal to experiments? Although most physicists since Newton would say No, there were a few interesting attempts, since Descartes, to prove the rational necessity of the laws of (physical) geometry, mechanics, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics. I will briefly review these attempts and argue that a few of them, based on broad criteria for the comprehensibility of nature, express a moderate, respectable, and instructive form of rationalism. |