A Middle Way: A Non-Fundamental Approach to Many-Body Physics - Hardcover

Batterman, Robert W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0197568610 ISBN 13: 9780197568613

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2021

Synopsis

Robert W. Batterman's monograph in the philosophy of physics focuses on how the Fluctuation-Dissipation theorem reveals important consequences for exploring and understanding the behavior of large, many-body systems. He develops a powerful methodology that privileges mesoscale levels between theories describing everyday behaviors of fluids and bending beams and those theories that describe the more fundamental, atomic nature of materials. The "hydrodynamic approach," which has its origins in Einstein's work on Brownian motion, aims to describe and account for continuum behaviors by largely ignoring details at the "fundamental" level. Einstein's work led to a fundamental theorem of statistical mechanics called the "Fluctuation-Dissipation" theorem. He argues against reductionist attempts to derive directly upper level theories from fundamental theories. Instead, he presents an approach to inter-theory relations that starts in the middle, bridging up to theories describing large scale behavior and down to those describing fundamental features.

About this title

About the Author

Robert W. Batterman is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to his arrival in Pittsburgh, he was the Rotman Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Science at the University of Western Ontario. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of The Devil in the Details: Asymptotic Reasoning in Explanation, Reduction, and Emergence (Oxford, 2002) and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Physics (2013). He works in the philosophy of physics and philosophy of applied mathematics, focusing primarily upon the area of condensed matter broadly construed. His research interests include the foundations of statistical physics, materials science, dynamical systems and chaos, asymptotic reasoning, mathematical idealizations, explanation, reduction, and emergence.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0197568610
• ISBN 13: 9780197568613
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 190