November 17, 2014 Kenneth Colangelo

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All are welcome to a free lecture, “The Emergence of Emergence,” by Dr. Peter Skiff on Monday, Nov. 17 at 1 p.m. in Room 6-127.

A description of the lecture states, “In the last 20 years, developments in science have rendered the dominant academic philosophy of science obsolete and irrelevant. In physics, for example, proposals such as time reversal in cosmology, string theory in particle theory, and symmetry breaking in condensed matter physics are just a few areas where classical notions of causality, theory reduction, logical consistency, and “scientific method” simply cannot be applied.

‘Emergence theory’ proposes that new laws ’emerge’ as systems evolve to more complexity. But, we might dare to ask, will philosophy ‘catch up’ with modern scientific arguments?”

Peter Skill, Ph.D., is a professor of physics and co-director of the Science, Technology and Society Program at Bard College. He served as referee for World Scientific, Advances in Applied Mathematics, Foundations of Physics at Cambridge University Press, and regularly publishes articles in such journals as “Nineteenth-Century Contexts,” “Foundations of Physics,” and “American Journal of Physics,” among others.