How the Laws of Physics Lie

How the Laws of Physics Lie

Nancy Cartwright

Language: English

Pages: 232

ISBN: 0198247044

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In this sequence of philosophical essays about natural science, the author argues that fundamental explanatory laws, the deepest and most admired successes of modern physics, do not in fact describe regularities that exist in nature. Cartwright draws from many real-life examples to propound a novel distinction: that theoretical entities, and the complex and localized laws that describe them, can be interpreted realistically, but the simple unifying laws of basic theory cannot.

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of its effect in this case. But this is only because the even more effective polonium is absent whenever the uranium is present. All the counter examples I know to the claim that causes increase the probability of their effects work in this same way. In all cases the cause fails to increase the probability of its effects for the same reason: in the situation described the cause is correlated with some other causal factor which dominates in its effects. This suggests that the condition as stated

necessary. Perhaps they live in a world that is not a Hume world; it may nevertheless be a world where causal laws can be inferred just from laws of association. 4. Conclusion The quantity Prob(E/C.K j ), which appears in both the causal condition of Part 1 and in the measure of effectiveness from Part 2, is called by statisticians the partial conditional probability of E on C, holding K jfixed; and it is used in ways similar to the ways I have used it here. It forms the foundation end

circuit, but missing from the models. end p.108 One can imagine handling this problem by constructing a larger, more complex model that includes the missing causal features. But such a model would have to be highly specific to the circuit in question and would thus have no general applicability. Instead a different procedure is followed. Measurements of the relevant parameters are made on the actual circuit under study, and then the measured values rather than the theoretically predicted

Weisskopf-Wigner' method. We can try to be more formal and avoid approximation altogether. The obvious way to proceed is to evaluate the Laplace transform, which turns out to be then To solve this equation, the integrand must be defined on the first and second Riemann sheets. The method is described clearly in Goldberger and Watson's text on collision theory.12 The primary contribution will come from a simple pole Δ such that This term will give us the exponential we want:

state alone. Without the dipole moments, there is no macroscopic polarization produced by the medium, and hence no grounds for the self-consistency equations with which Lamb's derivations begin. On the other hand, the classical character of the rate equations suggests that the atoms genuinely change their states. If so, this is just like the picture I have sketched for simple decay cases: the atom makes a transition, Schroedinger evolution stops and reduction of the wave packet takes over. The

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