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581The Elusive Higgs MechanismPhilosophy of Science 73 (5): 487-499. 2006.The Higgs mechanism is an essential but elusive component of the Standard Model of particle physics. Without it Yang‐Mills gauge theories would have been little more than a warm‐up exercise in the attempt to quantize gravity rather than serving as the basis for the Standard Model. This article focuses on two problems related to the Higgs mechanism clearly posed in Earman’s recent papers (Earman 2003, 2004a, 2004b): what is the gauge‐invariant content of the Higgs mechanism, and what does it mean…Read more
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1040Newton's PrincipiaIn Jed Z. Buchwald & Robert Fox (eds.), The Oxford handbook of the history of physics, Oxford University Press. pp. 109-165. 2013.The Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics brings together cutting-edge writing by more than twenty leading authorities on the history of physics from the seventeenth century to the present day. By presenting a wide diversity of studies in a single volume, it provides authoritative introductions to scholarly contributions that have tended to be dispersed in journals and books not easily accessible to the general reader. While the core thread remains the theories and experimental practices of …Read more
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270Review of Reading Natural Philosophy: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science and Mathematics (review)Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 36 (1): 194-199. 2005.Book Review for Reading Natural Philosophy: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science and Mathematics, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2002. Edited by David Malament. This volume includes thirteen original essays by Howard Stein, spanning a range of topics that Stein has written about with characteristic passion and insight. This review focuses on the essays devoted to history and philosophy of physics.
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402Philosophical Geometers and Geometrical PhilosophersIn Geoffrey Gorham (ed.), The Language of Nature: Reassessing the Mathematization of Natural Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century, University of Minnesota Press. pp. 308-338. 2016.Galileo’s dictum that the book of nature “is written in the language of mathematics” is emblematic of the accepted view that the scientific revolution hinged on the conceptual and methodological integration of mathematics and natural philosophy. Although the mathematization of nature is a distinctive and crucial feature of the emergence of modern science in the seventeenth century, this volume shows that it was a far more complex, contested, and context-dependent phenomenon than the received his…Read more
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5PrefacePhilosophy of Science 82 (5): 735-736. 2015.Preface to Philosophy of Science 82 (5). This volume contains a selection of contributed papers presented at the Philosophy of Science Association Meeting held in Chicago on November 6–9, 2014.
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558Time in CosmologyIn Adrian Bardon & Heather Dyke (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Time, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 201-219. 2013.This essay aims to provide a self-contained introduction to time in relativistic cosmology that clarifies both how questions about the nature of time should be posed in this setting and the extent to which they have been or can be answered empirically. The first section below recounts the loss of Newtonian absolute time with the advent of special and general relativity, and the partial recovery of absolute time in the form of cosmic time in some cosmological models. Section II considers the be…Read more
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708Philosophy of the Physical SciencesIn Paul Humphreys (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science, Oxford University Press Usa. 2016.The authors survey some debates about the nature and structure of physical theories and about the connections between our physical theories and naturalized metaphysics. The discussion is organized around an “ideal view” of physical theories and criticisms that can be raised against it. This view includes controversial commitments regarding the best analysis of physical modalities and intertheory relations. The authors consider the case in favor of taking laws as the primary modal notion, discuss…Read more
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4827Time travel and time machinesIn Craig Callender (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time, Oxford University Press. pp. 577-630. 2011.This paper is an enquiry into the logical, metaphysical, and physical possibility of time travel understood in the sense of the existence of closed worldlines that can be traced out by physical objects. We argue that none of the purported paradoxes rule out time travel either on grounds of logic or metaphysics. More relevantly, modern spacetime theories such as general relativity seem to permit models that feature closed worldlines. We discuss, in the context of Gödel's infamous argument for the…Read more
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From an Electromagnetic Theory of Matter to a New Theory of GravitationBoston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 250 623-756. 2007.
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1710Philosophy of CosmologyIn Robert Batterman (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Physics, Oxford University Press. pp. 607-652. 2013.
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484Predictability crisis in early universe cosmologyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 46 (PA): 122-133. 2014.Inflationary cosmology has been widely accepted due to its successful predictions: for a “generic” initial state, inflation produces a homogeneous, flat, bubble with an appropriate spectrum of density perturbations. However, the discovery that inflation is “generically eternal,” leading to a vast multiverse of inflationary bubbles with different low-energy physics, threatens to undermine this account. There is a “predictability crisis” in eternal inflation, because extracting predictions apparen…Read more
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211Gauge Pressure (review)Metascience 18 (1): 5-41. 2009.Symposium review of Richard Healey, Gauging What’s Real: The Conceptual Foundations of Contemporary Gauge Theories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. 297. $99.00 HB.
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835Einstein's Role in the Creation of Relativistic CosmologyIn Michel Janssen & Christoph Lehner (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Einstein, Cambridge University Press. pp. 228-269. 2014.This volume is the first systematic presentation of the work of Albert Einstein, comprising fourteen essays by leading historians and philosophers of science that introduce readers to his work. Following an introduction that places Einstein's work in the context of his life and times, the book opens with essays on the papers of Einstein's 'miracle year', 1905, covering Brownian motion, light quanta, and special relativity, as well as his contributions to early quantum theory and the opposition t…Read more
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215Tools without Theories (review)Metascience 15 (2): 333-337. 2006.Review of Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics, by David Kaiser. University of Chicago Press. 2005
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314Review of Geometric Possibility (review)Philosophia Mathematica 21 (3): 416-421. 2013.Review of Geometric Possibility (2011), by Gordon Belot. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. x + 219 pp.
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