Modeling in Physics Lecture 1: The Scientific Method and its Application to Very Hard Problems
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Abstract
The first two lectures of the course will be devoted to a discourse on the scientific method: each lecture will be devoted to describe an outstanding problem in physics, the cultural challenges, the disputes between different currents of thoughts and at the end, the students will be engaged into the prevailing interpretation and why the mainstream interpretation was empirically considered more successful than the competing approaches. I will address outstanding puzzles, such as the problem of superconductivity, and the interpretation of quantum mechanics between competing schools of thought, that was finally addressed by Bell’s work in the 60s, among others.
Sponsored by
National Science Foundation through CAREER grant No DMR-1352604