Logical Physics

In this stimulating study of the logical character of selected fundamental topics of physics, Zinovev has written the first, and major, stage of a general semantics of science. In that sense he has shown, by rigorous examples, that in certain basic and surprising respects we may envision a reducibility of science to logic; and further that we may detect and eliminate frequent confusion of abstract and empirical objects. In place of a near chaos of unplanned theoretical languages, we may look toward a unified and epistemologically clarified general scientific language. In the course of this work, Zinovev treats issues of continuing urgency: the non-trivial import of Zenos paradoxes; the residually significant meaning of cause in scientific explanation; the need for lucidity in the conceptions of wave and particle, and his own account of these; the logic of fields and of field propagation; Kants antimonies today; and, in a startling aper u, an insightful note on measuring consciousness. Logical physics, an odd-appearing field of investigation, is a part of logic; and as logic, logical physics deals with the linguistic expressions of time, space, particle, wave, field, causality, etc. How far this may be taken without explicit use of, or reference to, empirical statements is still to be clarified, but Zinovev takes a sympathetic reader well beyond a realists expectation, beyond the classical conventionalist. Zinovev presents his investigations in four chapters and an appendix of technical elucidation.