Synopsis
Preface.- A Galilean Dialogue.- A random journey.- History.- Reductionism: the philosophical point of view.- Reduction in physics and philosophy.- Emergence.- A first attempt to tame complexity.- A short history of statistical mechanics.- Towards a systematic theory.- The paradigmatic Brownian motion.- Critical Phenomena.- Discussion.- From microscopic to macroscopic realities.- The problem of irreversibility.- Irreversibility and emergence.- From microscopic to macroscopic equations.- From atoms to cold fronts.- Concluding remarks.- Determinism, chaos and reductionism.- General remarks on determinism.- An excursus on chaos.- Chaos and complexity.- Chaos and probability.- Quarrels on chaos and determinism.- Concluding remarks.- Quantum Mechanics.- Classical versus quantum mechanics.- Chemistry vs applied Quantum Mechanics.- Summary and conclusions.- Some conclusions.- Unity of science beyond reductionism.- It from bit?.- Concluding remarks.
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