Victor J. Stenger (1935 - 2014) was an adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado and emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Hawaii. He was the author of the New York Times bestseller God: The Failed Hypothesis, God and the Atom, God and the Folly of Faith, The Comprehensible Cosmos, and many other books.
Description
Preface; What Are the Laws of Physics?; The Stuff That Kicks Back; Point-of-View Invariance; Gauging the Laws of Physics; Forces and Broken Symmetries; Playing Dice; After the Bang; Out of the Void; The Comprehensible Cosmos; Models of Reality. Mathematical Supplements -- The Space-Time Model; Classical Mechanics and Relativity; Interaction Theory; Gauge Invariance; The Standard Model; Statistical Physics; Cosmology; Physics of the Vacuum; Bibliography; Index.
"Stenger ... provides a scientific answer to the question, 'where do the laws of physics come from?' Remarkably, his elegant and mathematically detailed derivation of the laws is driven by the requirement that the models physicists develop to describe objective reality cannot depend on the standpoint of the observer." -- PhilSci Archive, article presented at Metaphysics of Science conference in Melbourne, Australia, July 2-5, 2009.