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In the course of the nineteenth century, ‘cosmic feelings’ became somewhat of a technical term, but with a twist: these feelings, i.e. the feel­ings that the experience of the cosmos, its vastness, and its orderly beauty, kindle in man are highly ambivalent in character, both elevating and crush­ing. By studying the difficulty to express cosmic experiences in the works of Camille Flammarion and Adalbert Stifter, looking at the particular impor­tance accorded to cosmic nebulae and at the surprising variations that organ­ic metaphors undergo in the writings of the brothers von Humboldt, this paper tries to drive home an observation that is characteristic of discourses about the cosmos in the nineteenth century, but also far beyond this subject area: namely that in this period, feelings tend to be treated as highly general and highly abstract, and yet remain fully emotional experiences.

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Measurement is a cultural technique which aims at a numerical description of facts. As such it is fundamental for the use of mathematical techniques of representation and deduction. The history of the progressive formation of quantitative concepts in the expansion of the mathematical sciences proves to be a complicated process. This process occurs in a space spanned by the three dimensions of existing knowledge, technology, and symbolic resources and eventually results in a match between manipulations on a symbolic and an instrumental level. While the success of the mathematical natural sciences gave rise to Platonic speculations about a mathematical constitution of reality itself, the aspect of instrumental mediation in the process of measurement points toward a modern concept of nature that views it in terms of technical control, thus inscribing measurement into the modern project of a technical mastery of nature., Online Encyclopedia Philosophy of Nature, 2019

Verfassungsblog: On Matters Constitutional

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Mein Ziel ist eine Begründung der Physik aus der Operationalisierung ihrer Grundmaße. Wir beginnen mit der klassischen und relativistischen Kinematik. Dann greifen wir einen programmatischen Entwurf von Heinrich Hertz auf und gelangen über die Quantifizierung von Energie und Impuls zu den Bewegungsgleichungen und dem Wirkungsfunktional. Den Abschluß bildet eine relativistische Revision der Energie, Impuls und Massenvorstellung. Das Ziel ist nicht primär, den mathematischen Aufbau der Mechanik zu ändern oder zu verbessern, sondern ein tieferes physikalisches Verständnis der Mechanik zu erlangen, so wie Einstein mit seinen Gedankenexperimenten zur relativistischen Kinematik. Ausgehend von anerkannten Messhandlungen und Naturprinzipien wird der mathematische Formalismus erst erzeugt und somit neu beleuchtet. Die Arbeit steht damit im selben Kontext wie die aktuellen Bemühungen zur "Fundierung der Quantenmechanik", nur eben mit Bezug auf die Interpretation der klassischen und relativistischen Kalküle. My objective is a foundation of physics from the operationalization of its basic observables. We begin with classical and relativistic kinematics. Seizing on a programmatic proposal by Heinrich Hertz we arrive via quantification of energy-momentum at the equations of motion and the action functional. Finally we present a relativistic revision of energy, momentum and inertial mass. The goal is not primarily to change or improve the mathematical structure of mechanics, but to gain a deeper physical understanding of mechanics like Einstein with his gendanken experiments on relativistic kinematics. Starting from undisputed measurement operations and natural principles the mathematical formalism is only created and thus shown in a new light. This work is in the same context as current efforts to the "foundation of quantum mechanics", just with respect to the interpretation of the classical and relativistic calculuses.