Coincidences and Konstatierungen. Aspects of Methodological Creativity in Schlick's Science-Oriented Philosophizing

Moritz Schlick (1882–1936)—the integrating figure of the Vienna Circle—is an inspiring thinker who philosophizes in the immediate vicinity of contemporary physics in particular and other empirical sciences including psychology as well as ethics. In the context of interpreting Einstein’s (general) theory of relativity he wrote his „Space and time in contemporary physics, an introduction to the theory of relativity and gravitation“ [“Raum und Zeit in der gegenwärtigen Physik: zur Einführung in das Verständnis der Relativitäts- und Gravitations­theorie”]—first published in 1917. Schlick developed his conception of space-time coincidences of events. For the second edition he added the new chapter “X. Relations to Philosophy” using coincidences methodologically to connect terms which belong to different spaces of meaning. Starting in 1934—in the context of the debate on protocol sentences mainly with Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap—he offered his approach of Konstatierungen[1] to answer the question: “What is to be regarded as our fundament of knowledge?” I will shortly discuss Schlick’s term coincidence, move on to Konstatierungen and show some interrelations between them. I will argue for the methodological creativity in Schlick’s science-oriented philosophizing by explicating the inner structure of Konstatierungen within my 2-dimensional language of analysis. Finally, I will compare Schlick’s Konstatierungen with Kant’s synthetic a priori judgments and Frege’s thoughts as interrelated cases of two-dimensionally structured intermediate cases.

Hunting the gravitational waves: From Einstein to LIGO

This is a popular introduction to the scientific background of the detection of gravitational waves, starting from relativity and gravitation. It originates in a Chinese popular article the author wrote for the second Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award presented to the three scientists who twelve days later also received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Some clarifications about the Bohmian geodesic deviation equation and Raychaudhuri’s equation

One of the important and famous topics in general theory of relativity and gravitation is the problem of geodesic deviation and its related singularity theorems. An interesting subject is the investigation of these concepts when quantum effects are considered. Since the definition of trajectory is not possible in the framework of standard quantum mechanics (SQM), we investigate the problem of geodesic equation and its related topics in the framework of Bohmian quantum mechanics in which the definition of trajectory is possible. We do this in a fixed background and we do not consider the backreaction effects of matter on the space–time metric.