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This book is about the methods used for unifying different scientific theories under one all-embracing theory. The process has characterized much of the history of science and is prominent in contemporary physics; the search for a "theory of everything" involves the same attempt at unification. Margaret Morrison argues that, contrary to popular philosophical views, unification and explanation often have little to do with each other. The mechanisms that facilitate unification are not those that enable us to explain how or why phenomena behave as they do. The book emphasizes the importance of mathematical structures in unification, and claims that despite this common feature theory unification is a multi-faceted process for which no general account can be offered.
The Grand Unified Theory is the unification theory of the four fundamental forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force). It is through the interactions between these four forces of nature that everything in our universe is created, including our DNA and the cells that compose our body. Einstein spent much of the later part of his life trying to unify these forces, but without success. The grand unified theory is also called the theory of everything, because it is supposed to answer many fundamental questions about our universe. The questions such as, why does our universe exist? Why is our universe composed of three-dimensional space and not five or six? What is energy? Why is there conscious life in our universe? What is the function of life in the universal order?
Unifying Biology offers a historical reconstruction of one of the most important yet elusive episodes in the history of modern science: the evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s. For more than seventy years after Darwin proposed his theory of evolution, it was hotly debated by biological scientists. It was not until the 1930s that opposing theories were finally refuted and a unified Darwinian evolutionary theory came to be widely accepted by biologists. Using methods gleaned from a variety of disciplines, Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis argues that the evolutionary synthesis was part of the larger process of unifying the biological sciences. At the same time that scientists were working toward a synthesis between Darwinian selection theory and modern genetics, they were, according to the author, also working together to establish an autonomous community of evolutionists. Smocovitis suggests that the drive to unify the sciences of evolution and biology was part of a global philosophical movement toward unifying knowledge. In developing her argument, she pays close attention to the problems inherent in writing the history of evolutionary science by offering historiographical reflections on the practice of history and the practice of science. Drawing from some of the most exciting recent approaches in science studies and cultural studies, she argues that science is a culture, complete with language, rituals, texts, and practices. Unifying Biology offers not only its own new synthesis of the history of modern evolution, but also a new way of "doing history."
In-depth discussion of the value of scientific theories, bringing together and advancing current important debates in realism.
A unique contribution to the understanding of social science, showing the implications of quantum physics for the nature of human society.
In this comprehensive history of symbiosis theory--the first to be written--Jan Sapp masterfully traces its development from modest beginnings in the late nineteenth century to its current status as one of the key conceptual frameworks for the life sciences. The symbiotic perspective on evolution, which argues that "higher species" have evolved from a merger of two or more different kinds of organisms living together, is now clearly established with definitive molecular evidence demonstrating that mitochondria and chloroplasts have evolved from symbiotic bacteria. In telling the exciting story of an evolutionary biology tradition that has effectively challenged many key tenets of classical neo-Darwinism, Sapp sheds light on the phenomena, movements, doctrines, and controversies that have shaped attitudes about the scope and significance of symbiosis. Engaging and insightful, Evolution by Association will be avidly read by students and researchers across the life sciences.
At what point does theory depart the realm of testable hypothesis and come to resemble something like aesthetic speculation, or even theology? The legendary physicist Wolfgang Pauli had a phrase for such ideas: He would describe them as "not even wrong," meaning that they were so incomplete that they could not even be used to make predictions to compare with observations to see whether they were wrong or not. In Peter Woit's view, superstring theory is just such an idea. In Not Even Wrong , he shows that what many physicists call superstring "theory" is not a theory at all. It makes no predictions, even wrong ones, and this very lack of falsifiability is what has allowed the subject to survive and flourish. Not Even Wrong explains why the mathematical conditions for progress in physics are entirely absent from superstring theory today and shows that judgments about scientific statements, which should be based on the logical consistency of argument and experimental evidence, are instead based on the eminence of those claiming to know the truth. In the face of many books from enthusiasts for string theory, this book presents the other side of the story.
Rectifying misrepresentations of Popperian thought with a historical approach to Popper’s philosophy, Gattei reconstructs the logic of Popper’s development to show how one problem and its tentative solution led to a new problem.
In this monograph we study two generalizations of standard unification, E-unification and higher-order unification, using an abstract approach orig inated by Herbrand and developed in the case of standard first-order unifi cation by Martelli and Montanari. The formalism presents the unification computation as a set of non-deterministic transformation rules for con verting a set of equations to be unified into an explicit representation of a unifier (if such exists). This provides an abstract and mathematically elegant means of analysing the properties of unification in various settings by providing a clean separation of the logical issues from the specification of procedural information, and amounts to a set of 'inference rules' for unification, hence the title of this book. We derive the set of transformations for general E-unification and higher order unification from an analysis of the sense in which terms are 'the same' after application of a unifying substitution. In both cases, this results in a simple extension of the set of basic transformations given by Herbrand Martelli-Montanari for standard unification, and shows clearly the basic relationships of the fundamental operations necessary in each case, and thus the underlying structure of the most important classes of term unifi cation problems.