Matthias Schemmel – författare

This volume reviews conceptual conflicts at the foundations of physics now and in the past century.  The focus is on the conditions and consequences of Einstein’s pathbreaking achievements that sealed the decline of the classical notions of space, time, radiation, and matter, and resulted in the theory of relativity.  Particular attention is paid to the implications of conceptual conflicts for scientific views of the world at large, thus providing the basis for a comparison of the demise of the mechanical worldview at the turn of the 20th century with the challenges presented by cosmology at the turn of the 21st century.Throughout the work, Einstein’s contributions are not seen in isolation but instead set into the wider intellectual context of dealing with the problem of gravitation in the twilight of classical physics; the investigation of the historical development is carried out with a number of epistemological questions in mind, concerning, in particular, the transformation process of knowledge associated with the changing worldviews of physics.The contributions explore various aspects of the emerging relativistic views in modern physics by giving an historical, philosophical, and mathematical account of Einstein’s work, as well as the work of other distinguished physicists in the field.  Taken as a whole, the book is focused on the interplay between mathematical concepts and physical ideas throughout history by studying today’s scientific world and how it continues to redefine physics in the 21st century .

The short series The Historical Epistemology of Mechanics presents the long-term development of mechanical knowledge. The books in this series combine the presentation of a broad selection of relevant sources with in-depth analyses of the long-term development of mechanical knowledge focusing on the early modern period. This series is conceived in analogy to the four-volume series on The Genesis of General Relativity (BSPS 250). The English Galileo, the first book in this series, investigates the shared knowledge of preclassical mechanics by relating the work of Thomas Harriot on motion, documented by a wealth of manuscripts, to that of Galileo and other contemporaries. Harriot and Galileo indeed exploited the same shared knowledge resources in order to approach the same challenging objects. While the paths Harriot traces through the shared knowledge are different from Galileo's, the work of the two scientists displays striking similarities as regards their achievements as well as the problems they were unable to solve.The study of Harriot's parallel work thus allows the exploration of the structure of the shared knowledge of early modern mechanics, to perceive possible alternative histories, and to distinguish between individual peculiarities and shared structures of early modern mechanical reasoning.This study has received two distinguished awards, the Junior Scholar Award of the Georg Agricola Society and the Georg Uschmann Award of the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina.

This open access book presents a new translation, interpretation and analysis of selected passages from the so-called Mohist Canon, a Chinese text from ca.

This open access book presents a new translation, interpretation and analysis of selected passages from the so-called Mohist Canon, a Chinese text from ca.

This monograph investigates the development of human spatial knowledge by analyzing its elementary structures and studying how it is further shaped by various societal conditions. By taking a thoroughly historical perspective on knowledge and integrating results from various disciplines, this work throws new light on long-standing problems in epistemology such as the relation between experience and preformed structures of cognition.What do the orientation of apes and the theory of relativity have to do with each other? Readers will learn how different forms of spatial thinking are related in a long-term history of knowledge. Scientific concepts of space such as Newton’s absolute space or Einstein’s curved spacetime are shown to be rooted in pre-scientific structures of knowledge, while at the same time enabling the integration of an ever expanding corpus of experiential knowledge. This work addresses all readers interested in questions of epistemology, in particular philosophers and historians of science. It integrates forms of spatial knowledge from disciplines including anthropology, developmental psychology and cognitive sciences, amongst others.