An Introduction to the Philosophy of Physics: Locality, Fields, Energy, and Mass

by Marc Lange

This book combines physics, philosophy, and history in a radical new approach to introducing the philosophy of physics. It leads the reader through several central problems in the philosophy of physics by tracing their connections to a single issue: whether a cause must be spatiotemporally local to its effect, or whether action at a distance can occur

Genres: Philosophy, Physics, Science, Nonfiction, Textbooks

352 pages, Paperback

First published July 15, 2002

Reviews

[Don]

The physics is good, I suppose, but the writing is lackluster and the philosophy is dull. Indeed, Lange seems to have a hard time connecting the physics and the philosophy in an engaging way—his attempt is rather hamhanded.

[Anne Monroy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lowkey, it was a very good book that explores the physical paradigms of classical and modern physics, analyzing reality and causality in it.

Metaphysics is a difficult concept to understand, but ultimately one relates its study to the study of physics itself.

[Tuomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marc Lange has packed a lot of material into this introductory book. His prose is mostly pleasant to read and his manages to make the difficult topic of philosophy of physics quite approachable. There is a bit of a story arc going thorough the book as well, focusing on the problem of "action at a distance" (and other issues), but each chapter could certainly be read on its own as well. However, although the book is at an appropriate level, one may still get the impression that there are too many equations in the book. Some are no doubt needed and at times Lange discusses the technicalities in a helpful manner (such as with Einstein's famous equation), but at times the book starts to briefly resemble a physics textbook. All in all a great book though. I would've liked to see a bit more on specific issues in the metaphysics of physics, such as causation, time, laws, and so on, but Lange does of course take up many of these issues elsewhere.

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just want to say that this is an exemplary book but it is strictly for beginners. That is, it will teach you a kind of gateway set of questions in philosophy of science, or an over view of what those questions might look like. So if you study physics and you wonder why you are not allowed to ask certain questions about fields, locality and the like, this might be very illuminating that you are not crazy and there is a way to pose questions about physics that makes sense, but is not part of physics proper at least not the way it is taught by rote and blind problem solving. Incidentally relearning fields in the language of potential and higher dimensional equipotential levels (two forms) makes a lot more sense than field or flow lines and the electromagnetic field tensor should take the place of the field components, which are reference frame dependent and not physically real.

[Hans · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic discussion on the reality of fields and how they preserve spaciotemporal locality. At times, it becomes obtuse, but it always reexplains everything so that if you don't understand it at first, just continue reading and it will be explained in more detail. The one downside, is that it is meant for science readers and not physics readers so that the math at the end of the book, when discussing quantum mechanics, is too simplistic and therefore there is more explanation when higher-level math would have sufficed.

[Kao Ethan · Rating 4 out of 5]

if you want to know what "field" is exactly and wonder if we have good reasons to believe "field" exists without electric charge's existence, then I think you will need it.. :)