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Budapest Reading Seminar on the Foundations of Physics

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Against Fields

...the concept of fields as mediators of particle interactions turns out to be philosophically unsatisfying and physically problematic, as it leads, in particular, to problematic self-interactions. Against this background, I will argue that the true significance of fields is that of “book-keeping variables”...
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Indistinguishability

The concept of particle indistinguishability thus construed faces some obvious challenges. It remains controversial, now for more than a century, whether classical particles can be treated as indistinguishable; or if they can, whether the puzzles raised by Gibbs are thereby solved or alleviated; and if so, how the differences between quantum and classical statistics are to be explained.
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Radiation from a Uniformly Accelerated Charge and the Equivalence Principle

It is generally accepted that any accelerated charge in Minkowski space radiates energy. It is also accepted that a stationary charge in a static gravitational field (such as a Schwarzschild field) does not radiate energy. It would seem that these two facts imply that some forms of Einstein’s Equivalence Principle do not apply to charged particles.
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Unruh effect (Kiss Tamás?)


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On the Exact Identity Between Thermodynamic and Informatic Entropies in a Unitary Model of Friction (Diósi Lajos?)

We consider an elementary collision model of a molecular reservoir upon which an external field is applied and the work is dissipated into heat. To realize macroscopic irreversibility at the microscopic level, we introduce a “graceful” irreversible map which randomly mixes the identities of the molecules. This map is expected to generate informatic entropy exactly equal to the independently calculable irreversible thermodynamic entropy.
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