History of Scientific Thinking
(Broadcasting University Press, Tel Aviv 1984)
Preface
7
1. From Copernicus to Aristotle via Einstein
11
2. Nature, or how Aristotle created a non-informative science
21
3. The world as failure – Plato’s plan to save the phenomena
27
4. Disputes on the void and how zero became a number
33
5. The Trojan horse of Platonism: Galileo’s physics
40
6. inertia and the nullification of matter: Descartes and analysis
46
7. Logic, experiment, and mathematics – the irrationality of the new physics
52
8. Newtonian physics and the peak of informativity
59
9. The fall of informativity – physics in the 18th and 19th centuries
66
10. Faraday’s field theory: the new Aristotelianism
72
11. Aristotelian and platonic interpretations of the theory of relativity
85
12. The aristotelism of the theory of relativity
93
13. Principles and Aristotelian view: relativity and quantum mechanics
100