November 7, 2007
GUEST BLOG: Bayesian Probability and Quantum Mechanics
Hello. As a brief introductory reminder, I'm Lauren, Kenny's fiance, and a guest blogger here when I have time (which isn't very often.) However, I am going to take some time to discuss a paper by Bas C. van Fraassen, Conditionalizing on Violated Bell's Inequalities, in which he claims that quantum mechanics creates problems for Bayesian epistemology. I have two main points to make in response, the first is that he doesn't actually need quantum mechanics for his argument, and the second is where he has failed to account for the effect of choosing which events to talk about, which...
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July 2, 2007
GUEST BLOG: Philosophical Implications of Wave-Particle Duality: Part 2
A few days ago, I talked about the classical assumptions relevant to wave-particle duality, in part 1 of this series. I hope to build up to discussing the relevant philosophical questions, most of which probably won't come in until part 4. But first, here and in the next part, I'm going to briefly discuss the important experiments in the development of wave-particle duality, because however it's interpreted in the philosophical discussion, it can't run afoul of these. This post is mostly physics; however, there's no math whatsoever. As always, suggestions about how to improve the physics to philosophy ratio would...
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June 28, 2007
GUEST BLOG: Philosophical Implications of Wave-Particle Duality: Part 1
Hello world! For those of you who missed the announcement, I am Lauren, Kenny's fiance, and now a guest blogger here. As Kenny mentioned, I'm majoring in physics, math, and philosophy, so one thing that I'm hoping to discuss on this blog is philosophical issues related to physics. As you can probably guess from the title, the first thing I've decided to try is wave-particle duality, an aspect of quantum mechanics. In particularly, wave-particle duality raises interesting questions about the relationship between properties and objects, whether there is one "thing" with wave properties and particle properties, or whether there is...
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