Slides (in Bulgarian) of the talk "What do physics and philosophy tell us about the physical world?" given on 30 April 2025 and organized by the Department of Philosophy of Science of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

The slides are in Bulgarian, but contain a lot of diagrams and added links to pages and PDF files in English.


The English text of the poster is given below



WHAT DO PHYSICS AND PHILOSOPHY TELL US ABOUT THE PHYSICAL WORLD?

Vesselin Petkov
Minkowski Institute
Montreal, Canada
https://www.minkowskiinstitute.com
https://vesselinpetkov.com
vpetkov@minkowskiinstitute.com

30 April 2025, 11:00
"Acad. Ivan Geshov" Hall of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

Abstract
The fact that so far there has been no universally accepted view of the world (of physical reality) can be interpreted as evidence that neither physics nor philosophy tells us anything certain about what exists. In reality, however, this fact reveals an unprecedented situation in both physics and philosophy - for more than a century it has not been clearly realized: (a) that the essence of Hermann Minkowski's revolutionary discovery (summarized in his 1908 lecture) is that reality is a four-dimensional world; (b) that his arguments for the reality of this four-dimensional world (spacetime) seem irrefutable, because experiments would be impossible if these arguments were wrong. The purpose of the lecture is to clarify this unprecedented situation and to answer the question in the title.


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