Dean Rickles Public Health

A Package of Positions in the Philosophy of Physics

This is a very useful and easily assimilated summary of recent work in the philosophy of physics. It focuses on four areas: philosophy of non-relativistic quantum mechanics (David Wallace), foundations of statistical mechanics (Roman Frigg), philosophical aspects of quantum information theory (Chris Timpson), and current approaches to quantum gravity (Dean Rickles). The intended audience is ‘‘b...

Interpreting Quantum Gravity ∗ Dean Rickles †

In recent times physicists and philosophers of physics have tended to tread very different paths, and they have generally been a little suspicious of one another. As Michael Redhead points out in the first of his Tarner Lectures, “many physicists would dismiss the sort of question that philosophers of physics tackle as irrelevant to what they see themselves as doing” while “philosophers general...

Dean Rickles Time , Observables , and Structure

In this chapter I consider what recent work on background independent physics can do for structuralism, and what structuralism can do for background independent physics. I focus on the problems of time and observables in gravitational physics. The ‘frozen’ character of the observables of general relativity is usually considered to constitute a serious problem for the theory. I argue that by inv...

Dual Theories: ‘Same But Different’ or ‘Different But Same’?

I argue that, under the glitz, dual theories are examples of theoretically equivalent descriptions of the same underlying physical content: I distinguish them from cases of genuine underdetermination on the grounds that there is no real incompatibility involved between the descriptions. The incompatibility is at the level of unphysical structure. I argue that dual pairs are in fact very strongl...

Population-based spot maps: an epidemiologic technique.