Doing Physics makes concepts of physics easier to grasp by relating them to everyday knowledge. Addressing some of the models and metaphors that physicists use to explain the physical world, Martin H. Krieger describes the conceptual world of physics by means of analogies to economics, anthropology, theater, carpentry, mechanisms such as clockworks, and machine tool design. The interaction of elementary particles or chemical species, for example, can be related to the theory of kinship—who can marry whom is like what can interact with what. Likewise, the description of physical situations in terms of interdependent particles and fields is analogous to the design of a factory with its division of labor among specialists. For the new edition, Krieger has revised the text and added a chapter on the role of mathematics and formal models in physics. Doing Physics will be of special interest to economists, political theorists, anthropologists, and sociologists as well as philosophers of science.

This book discusses some ways of doing mathematical work and the subject matter that is being worked upon and created. It argues that the conventions we adopt, the subject areas we delimit, what we can prove and calculate about the physical world, and the analogies that work for mathematicians--all depend on mathematics, what will work out and what won't. And the mathematics, as it is done, is shaped and supported, or not, by convention, subject matter, calculation, and analogy. The causes studied include the central limit theorem of statistics, the sound of the shape of a drum, the connection between algebra and topology, the stability of matter, the Ising model, and the Langlands Program in number theory and representation theory. Contents: Convention: How Means and Variances are Entrenched as Statistics; Subject: The Fields of Topology; Appendix: The Two-Dimensional Ising Model of a Ferromagner; Calculation: Strategy, Structure, and Tactics in Applying Classical Analysis; Analogy; A Syzygy Between a research Program in Mathematics and a Research Program in Physics, Each of Which is Itself an Analogy; Mathematics in Concreto. Readership: Mathematicians, Physicists, philosophers and historians of science.