Pierre Duhem’s philosophical rejection of special relativity in his 1915 pamphlet in La Science allemande has been dismissed as the rantings of an aging physicist motivated by anti-German war propaganda, if not by outright anti-Semitism. While these factors undoubtedly contributed, they do not entirely account for his position.
Continue readingIn this preprint, I examine Gaston Bachelard’s 1929 work, La valeur inductive de la relativité, which offers a distinct take on Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Continue readingIn a brief, accessible article, John Stewart Bell (1976) describes presenting a thought experiment to his colleagues, which attracted considerable attention at… COPIED. Eventually, confidence led to its breaking. “Is it really so?” Bell asked his colleagues. According to Bell’s account, “a clear consensus emerged that the thread would not break!” (Bell, 1976, 136).
Continue readingIn a 1919 article for the Times of London, Einstein declared the relativity to be a ‘principle theory’, like thermodynamics, rather than a “constructive theory”, like the kinetic theory of gases.
Continue readingDon Howard and Sebastián Murgueitio Ramírez have just put online the complete issues of Lettres épistémologiques, a small journal dedicated to the foundations of physics published from 1973 to 1984 by the Institut de la Méthode in Bienne, Switzerland.