Olivier Darrigol
Directeur de recherches, University Paris Diderot - CNRS SPHERE, Paris, France
Date
8 March 2017
Host
Gian Michele Graf
Title
Necessity and Contingency of Physical Theories
Abstract
Can we derive physical theories by pure reasoning, without appeal to experiments? Although most physicists since Newton would say No, there were a few interesting attempts, since Descartes, to prove the rational necessity of the laws of (physical) geometry, mechanics, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics. I will briefly review these attempts and argue that a few of them, based on broad criteria for the comprehensibility of nature, express a moderate, respectable, and instructive form of rationalism.
Olivier Darrigol (right) with Gian Michele Graf