Abstract
It seems a generally acknowledged view that physics is confined to the investigation of events that can be reproduced. “The natural scientist — says Pauli1 — is concerned with a particular kind of phenomena … he has to confine himself to that which is reproducible… I do not claim that the reproducible by itself is more important than the unique. But I do claim that the unique exceeds the treatment by scientific method. Indeed it is the aim of this method to find and to test natural laws…” Here for Pauli as for everybody else a natural law is a statement expressing a regularity more or less directly related to repeatable events. And one may add that it is not only the possibility of testing that is responsible for our demand of reproducibility. Rather it is the very fact of regularity expressed in it that gives a natural law its dignity and makes it a subject worth studying on its own account.
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Notes
W. Pauli Aufsätze und Vorträge über Physik und Erkenntnistheorie. Braunschweig 1961, p. 94
F. Hund: Geschichte der physikalischen Begriffe. Mannheim 1972, p. 274
E.P. Wigner: Symmetries and Reflections. Woodbridge, Conn., 1979, p. 3. no. 1
G. Vollmer: Kann es von einmaligen Ereignissen eine Wissenschaft geben? In: Ders.: Was können wir wissen? Bd. 2. Stuttgart 1986. 53–65
E. Schrödinger: Ueber Indeterminismus in der Physik. Leipzig 1932, p. 2
See the quotations in Galileo. Man of Science. Ed. by E. McMullin. New York 1967. Pp. 329 f., 356 f.
For the following view on theories see E. Scheibe: On the Structure of Physical Theories. In: The Logic and Epistemology of Scientific Change. Ed. by I. Niiniluoto and R. Tuomela. Amsterdam 1979. 205–24
See, for instance, C.G. Hempel: Aspects of Scientific Explanation. New York 1965. Pp. 264 ff., 335 ff., 354 ff.
E. Nagel: The Structure of Science. New York 1961, Ch. 4
The problem how the domain of application of a physical theory can be described is treated in W. Stegmüller: The Structure and Dynamics of Theories. New York 1976. Ch. IX. 4 and S
I. Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B39.
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Dedicated to Peter Mittelstaedt on the occasion of his 60th birthday
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Scheibe, E. (1991). General Laws of Nature and the Uniqueness of the Universe. In: Agazzi, E., Cordero, A. (eds) Philosophy and the Origin and Evolution of the Universe. Synthese Library, vol 217. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3598-6_10
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