Philosophy of Symmetry Breaking
Thursday, November 3rd, 2005As 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.