My Research
Thought Experiments and Scientific Representation
I defend a pragmatic account of scientific representation in which representations are tools that offer affordances to scientists that allow them to interact with the world and think through problems in more effective ways. However, a conception of representation like this one in which how closely a representation ‘mirrors’ or ‘resembles’ the world is largely irrelevant, needs a different explanation than improved mirroring for how and why representations change. I argue that thought experiments are one of the major vehicles of representational change. They are the test-beds of representation. Thought experiments work by assessing the pragmatic virtues of representational schemes and testing whether different representations are compatible with each other.
I defend this account with examples from the history of physics, from Aristotle to Descartes to Boltzmann.
Alchemy and Early Modern Matter Theory
I study the connections between theories about the possibility of alchemy and beliefs about metals, matter, and materials, especially in the works of Robert Boyle, his influences, and his contemporaries.
History of Math and Physics
I work on the history of physics and mathematics across multiple periods. I’m particularly interested in paradoxes, unusual uses of mathematics, and Polya-esque uses of analogy and imagination.
My recent work has focused on the evolution of the concepts of Space and Time throughout the 19th Century.
Works in Progress
(Feel free to Contact Me for drafts)
Lotto 1877: Boltzmann, Lakatos, and Thought Experiments
Ludwig Boltzmann’s great paper of 1877 has a puzzling feature: a long and evolving analogy between a gas and a lottery machine that dominates the paper but is inessential to the final construction. In this paper, I explain Boltzmann’s lottery analogy as a kind of Lakatosian heuristic, and show how heuristics of this kind are vital in the development of new scientific models.
Reinventing the Wheel: Paradox, Thought Experiment, and the Rota Aristotelica
In this paper I argue that paradoxes and thought experiments are not distinct phenomena, but that paradoxes are the results of thought experiments. I use Quine’s tripartite taxonomy of paradox and show that the three parts fall naturally out of considering paradoxes as flowing out of thought experiments. I then illustrate the way in which the three kinds of paradox manifest by examining the strange and twisted history of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Paradox of the Wheel.