55 ideas
23000 | Vicious regresses force you to another level; non-vicious imply another level [Baron/Miller] |
23024 | A traveller takes a copy of a picture into the past, gives it the artist, who then creates the original! [Baron/Miller] |
23008 | Grounding is intended as a relation that fits dependences between things [Baron/Miller] |
23018 | How does a changing object retain identity or have incompatible properties over time? [Baron/Miller] |
20239 | Unlike us, the early Greeks thought envy was a good thing, and hope a bad thing [Hesiod, by Nietzsche] |
23011 | Modern accounts of causation involve either processes or counterfactuals [Baron/Miller] |
23013 | The main process theory of causation says it is transference of mass, energy, momentum or charge [Baron/Miller] |
23014 | If causes are processes, what is causation by omission? (Distinguish legal from scientific causes?) [Baron/Miller] |
23015 | The counterfactual theory of causation handles the problem no matter what causes actually are [Baron/Miller] |
23016 | Counterfactual theories struggle with pre-emption by a causal back-up system [Baron/Miller] |
20624 | Work degrades into heat, but not vice versa [Close] |
20623 | First Law: energy can change form, but is conserved overall [Close] |
20625 | Third Law: total order and minimum entropy only occurs at absolute zero [Close] |
23009 | There is no second 'law' of thermodynamics; it just reflects probabilities of certain microstates [Baron/Miller] |
20628 | The electric and magnetic are tightly linked, and viewed according to your own motion [Close] |
20622 | All motions are relative and ambiguous, but acceleration is the same in all inertial frames [Close] |
20635 | The general relativity equations relate curvature in space-time to density of energy-momentum [Close] |
20642 | Photon exchange drives the electro-magnetic force [Close] |
20627 | Electric fields have four basic laws (two by Gauss, one by Ampère, one by Faraday) [Close] |
20630 | Light isn't just emitted in quanta called photons - light is photons [Close] |
20637 | In general relativity the energy and momentum of photons subjects them to gravity [Close] |
20629 | Electro-magnetic waves travel at light speed - so light is electromagnetism! [Close] |
20632 | In QED, electro-magnetism exists in quantum states, emitting and absorbing electrons [Close] |
20639 | Quantum fields contain continual rapid creation and disappearance [Close] |
20631 | Dirac showed how electrons conform to special relativity [Close] |
20641 | Electrons get their mass by interaction with the Higgs field [Close] |
20626 | Modern theories of matter are grounded in heat, work and energy [Close] |
20633 | The Higgs field is an electroweak plasma - but we don't know what stuff it consists of [Close] |
23002 | In relativity space and time depend on one's motion, but spacetime gives an invariant metric [Baron/Miller] |
20640 | Space-time is indeterminate foam over short distances [Close] |
22988 | The block universe theory says entities of all times exist, and time is the B-series [Baron/Miller] |
22991 | How can we know this is the present moment, if other times are real? [Baron/Miller] |
22992 | If we are actually in the past then we shouldn't experience time passing [Baron/Miller] |
22994 | Erzatz Presentism allows the existence of other times, with only the present 'actualised' [Baron/Miller] |
22998 | How do presentists explain relations between things existing at different times? [Baron/Miller] |
23017 | Presentism needs endurantism, because other theories imply most of the object doesn't exist [Baron/Miller] |
23023 | How can presentists move to the next future moment, if that doesn't exist? [Baron/Miller] |
22995 | Most of the sciences depend on the concept of time [Baron/Miller] |
22993 | For abstractionists past times might still exist, althought their objects don't [Baron/Miller] |
23001 | The error theory of time's passage says it is either a misdescription or a false inference [Baron/Miller] |
22999 | It is meaningless to measure the rate of time using time itself, and without a rate there is no flow [Baron/Miller] |
22986 | The C-series rejects A and B, and just sees times as order by betweenness, without direction [Baron/Miller] |
22996 | The A-series has to treat being past, present or future as properties [Baron/Miller] |
23007 | The B-series can have a direction, as long as it does not arise from temporal flow [Baron/Miller] |
23003 | Static theories cannot account for time's obvious asymmetry, so time must be dynamic [Baron/Miller] |
23004 | The direction of time is either primitive, or reducible to something else [Baron/Miller] |
23005 | The kaon does not seem to be time-reversal invariant, unlike the rest of nature [Baron/Miller] |
23006 | Maybe the past is just the direction of decreasing entropy [Baron/Miller] |
23010 | We could explain time's direction by causation: past is the direction of causes, future of effects [Baron/Miller] |
22989 | Static time theory presents change as one property at t1, and a different property at t2 [Baron/Miller] |
23020 | If a time traveller kills his youthful grandfather, he both exists and fails to exist [Baron/Miller] |
23022 | Presentism means there no existing past for a time traveller to visit [Baron/Miller] |
22987 | The past (unlike the future) is fixed, along with truths about it, by the existence of past objects [Baron/Miller] |
22990 | The moving spotlight says entities can have properties of being present, past or future [Baron/Miller] |
22997 | The present moment is a matter of existence, not of acquiring a property [Baron/Miller] |