John MacNeill Miller is the author of The Ecological Plot: How Stories Gave Rise to a Science. Title: The Poetics of Science Abstract: When it comes to categorizing knowledge, academic institutions are divided—and increasingly unclear about what their divisional categories even are or should be. Terms with long institutional histories (the arts and sciences; the […]
Heather Demarest is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Title: "Macrostates, Natural Kinds, and Statistical Mechanics" Abstract: The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy (almost) always increases over time. However, different systems do this in very different ways. In some systems, like boxes of gas, entropy increases smoothly and uniformly. […]
P. James Peebles, Princeton University. The Physicists’ Philosophy of Physics Abstract: I will argue that physicists share an implicit but well-defined way of thinking that amounts to a philosophy, though one that I expect is more tightly prescriptive than many discussed by real philosophers. The physicists’ philosophy differs from that of the other natural sciences […]