Bulletin of the American Physical Society
75th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Section of APS
Volume 53, Number 13
Thursday–Saturday, October 30–November 1 2008; Raleigh, North Carolina
Session JB: History and Philosophy of Physics |
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Chair: Ronald Mickens, Clark Atlanta University Room: Holiday Inn Brownstone Roosevelt |
Friday, October 31, 2008 1:30PM - 2:00PM |
JB.00001: P.A.M. Dirac's Impact on Physics Invited Speaker: Paul Dirac (1902-1984) was not as well known as the other founding fathers of quantum mechanics in the 1920's, but his contributions were equally important, and he won the Nobel Prize in 1933, at the same time as Heisenberg and Schr\"{o}dinger. He spent the last fifteen years of his life in the SESAPS region, in Tallahassee, Florida. I will describe his life and his work, comment on his style, and recount how he arrived at the relativistic wave equation. I will describe one of my personal encounters with Dirac and, if I can manage not to bungle it, show a physics demonstration that is relevant to the application of group theory to quantum mechanics, a subject that Dirac and other detractors scathingly referred to as \textit{Gruppenpest.} [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 31, 2008 2:00PM - 2:30PM |
JB.00002: Entanglement, Complementarity, and Decoherence: Bohr on the Classical and the Macroscopic Invited Speaker: Does decoherence validate or invalidate Bohr's complementarity interpretation of quantum mechanics? Both positions have been asserted in recent literature. This paper argues that Bohr's understanding of the relationship between quantum and classical descriptions is strongly reinforced by decoherence, but only if complementarity is rightly understood as (a) not asserting wave-packet collapse, (b) not requiring a classical description of the measurement apparatus in its entirety, and (c) taking entanglement as the essence of a quantum-mechanical description. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 31, 2008 2:30PM - 3:00PM |
JB.00003: The Rise and Fall of the Luminiferous Aether: Are We Poised for Another Rise? Invited Speaker: If there is a wave, something material should be ``waving.'' This notion led in to luminiferous medium (aether). Cauchy explained Fresnel's diffraction experiment as the shear waves of his elastic aether. Maxwell added the ``displacement current'' which resulted into a characteristic speed of propagation identified as the speed of light. In the late 19th century the investigations were predominantly aimed at discovering the medium described by Maxwell equations, but none was found. The nil result of Michelson and Morley experiment was thought to disprove the existence of the aether. The wave equation of electrodynamics was made invariant by changing the time in the moving frame: so-called Lorentz Transformation (LT) which set a new paradigm. LT, however, is not valid in accelerating or deforming coordinate frames. Its consistent application leads to paradoxes. Recently, a truly invariant model of space as a material continuum (metacontinuum) has been proposed whose corollary are the Maxwell equations. The charges are shown to undergo Lorentz contraction as moving patterns. Accounting for the motion of the emitting atom relative to the metacontinuum, explains the Ives--Stilwell experiment without time dilation. Thus, the stage is set for a new look into the absolute medium. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 31, 2008 3:00PM - 3:30PM |
JB.00004: What is a Physical Law? Invited Speaker: Laws of nature are distinguished from logical and mathematical truths, on the one hand, and from ``accidental facts'' (such as that every atom in some particular spatiotemporal region is lead), on the other hand. What is it for some fact to be a law? Roughly speaking, laws, unlike accidents, would still have held no matter what -- even if other things had been different. For instance, if Earth's axis had been tipped differently, then various accidental features of Earth's seasons would have been different, but the laws of nature would have been no different. However, this way of drawing the distinction between laws and accidents threatens to appeal to the very distinction that it is supposed to illuminate: some fact p is a law if and only if for any hypothetical state of affairs q that is logically consistent with the laws, p would still have held had q been the case. (The risk of circularity arises from the requirement that q be logically consistent with the laws.) In this talk, I will explain how to avoid referring to lawhood on the right side of this ``if and only if.'' The resulting account of the distinction between laws and accidents nicely explains the sense in which things ``cannot'' break the laws. [Preview Abstract] |
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