Physics, Logic, and History

It is a trite and often lamented fact that every academic discipline suffers from the malady of overspecialization and expertise. Who, in his scholarly experience, has not encountered technical gibberish and the jargon of the pundit? The contributors to this work have aUempted to remove the artifi cial barriers between these respective disciplines. The purpose of this volume is to explore the ever present links between logic, physical reality, and history. Indeed there are not two or three or four cuItures: there is only one culture; our generation has lost its awareness of this. Though serious, it is not tragic. All we need is to free ourselves from the fetters of mere "technicalese" and search for a comprehensive interpretation of logical and physical theories. His'torians, logicians, physicists - all are banded in one common enterprise, namely in their desire to weave an enlightened fabric of human knowledge. It is a current, and perhaps weJcome, trend in philosophie inquiry to de-psychologize systems, methods, and theories. However, there is an equally fashionable tendency to minimize or even eschew the historical aspects of logical and physical theories, and analogously, there is a deep seated mistrust among physicists and cosmologists against the seemingly pure abstractions of logical formalisms.

I. A Realist View of Logic, Physics, and History.- II. Knowledge and Physical Reality.- III. The Science of History and Notions of Personality.- IV. The Growth of a Theoretical Model: A Simple Case Study.- V. Existence.- VI. The Problems of Unifying Cosmology with Microphysics.- VII. The Evolution of Evolution.- VIII. Plea for Pluralism in Philosophy and Physics.- IX. On Semantic Information.- X. Quantification and Ontological Commitment.- XI. Possible Internal Subquantum Motions of Elementary Particles.- XII. The Three Kings of Physics.- XIII. Scepticism and the Study of History.- XIV. Causation in History.- XV. Relativity Theory and Historicity of Physical Systems.- XVI. General Relativity as an Open Theory.- XVII. What Is Russell's Theory of Descriptions?.- XVIII. The Non-Quantal Foundations of Quantum Mechanics.- XIX. Some Problems of the Connection between Technical Development and Economic History.- XX. Is Science Human?.- Conclusion The Editors.