As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, I came across an entry on symmetry breaking at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It’s interesting to see philosophy directly engaging with the implications of modern physics.
They also have two entries on the philosophical underpinnings of statistical mechanics: a general entry, and a more specific one on Boltzmann. The actual justification for statistical mechanics and the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics is apparently fairly controversial.
There’s a lot of good entries on subjects one might not have thought were philosophical there – in mathematics, note entries on Boolean Algebra, Model Theory, Set Theory, Category Theory, and even one that talks quite a bit about Sheaf Theory (they don’t get too much into the mathematical details there, because the technical philosophical details are already a bit much, and there’s only so much mathematics a general philosophical audience can be expected to tolerate).
That trope link is one of the bizarrest I’ve ever seen.