String theory has played a highly influential role in theoretical physics for nearly three
decades and has substantially altered our view of the elementary building principles of the …

How should we reason in science? Jan Sprenger and Stephan Hartmann offer a refreshing
take on classical topics in philosophy of science, using a single key concept to explain and …

Quantum Field Theory (QFT) is the mathematical and conceptual framework for
contemporary elementary particle physics. It is also a framework used in other areas of …

Scientific theories are hard to find, and once scientists have found a theory, H, they often
believe that there are not many distinct alternatives to H. But is this belief justified? What …

In science and everyday life, we often infer that something is true because it would explain
some set of facts better than any other hypothesis we can think of. But what if we have …

The paper provides a presentation and motivation of the concept of non-empirical theory
confirmation. Non-empirical theory confirmation is argued to play an important role in the …

Controversies over string theory (collectively termed the 'string wars') intensified in 2005.
Also in that year, the open-access preprint publisher arxiv instituted a new feature called a …

Over the last few decades, our theories of fundamental physics have become increasingly
detached from empirical data. Recently, Richard Dawid has argued that the progressive …

The universal acceptance of atomism in physics and chemistry in the early 20th century went
along with an altered view on the epistemic status of microphysical conjectures. Contrary to …

A prominent type of scientific realism holds that some important parts of our best current
scientific theories are at least approximately true. According to such realists, radically distinct …