This book addresses several of the foundational problems in thermophysics, i. e. thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. It is an interdisciplinary work in that it examines the philosophical underpinning of scientific models and theories; it also refines the analysis of the problems at hand and delineates the place occupied by various scientific models in a generalized philosophical landscape. Hence, our philosophical - or theoretical - inquiry focuses sharply on the concept of models; and our empirical - or laboratory - evidence is sought in the model-building activities of scientists who...

This volume marks the twentieth anniversary of the Bialowieza series of meetings on Differential Geometric Methods in Physics; the anniversary meeting was held during July 1-7, 2001. The Bialowieza meetings, held every year during the first week of July, have now grown into an annual pilgrimage for an international group of physicists and mathematicians. The topics discussed at the meetings, while within the broad area of differential geometric methods in physics, have focused around quantization, coherent states, infinite dimensional systems, symplestic geometry, spectral theory and harmonic...

This book is devoted to a thorough analysis of the role that models play in the practise of physical theory. The authors, a mathematical physicist and a philosopher of science, appeal to the logicians' notion of model theory as well as to the concepts of physicists.