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Hermann Weyl, The Physical World, the Mind and Scientific Knowledge (Minkowski Institute Press, Montreal), 181 pages ISBN: 978-1-998902-58-3 (ebook) - $7.00 ISBN: 978-1-998902-56-9 (softcover) - $18.00 ISBN: 978-1-998902-57-6 (hardcover) - $27.00 Edited by Svetla Petkova and Vesselin Petkov Published on 16 December 2024 Buy the ebook (PDF with hyperlinks)

In these books Weyl discussed topics ranging from the nature of the physical world as revealed mostly by two epoch-making discoveries - relativity and quantum mechanics, to the role of mind (consciousness) in obtaining adequate knowledge about the external world and to what scientific knowledge is.

What also adds to the value of the present book is that Weyl was the first who tried to reconcile two seemingly irreconcilable facts - Minkowski's discovery of the spacetime structure of the world (that it is a static four-dimensional world containing en bloc the entire history of the perceived by us three-dimensional world) and the inter-subjective fact that we are aware of ourselves and the world only at one single moment of time - the present moment (the moment now) - which constantly changes:

"The objective world merely exists, it does not happen; as a whole
it has no history. Only before the eye of the consciousness climbing
up in the worldline of my body, a section of this world "comes to life"
and moves past it as a spatial image engaged in temporaltransformation."

Weyl reached the conclusion that it is our consciousness (somehow "travelling" in the four-dimensional world along our worldlines) which creates our feeling that time flows. Unfortunately, Weyl's reconciliation of the above facts has not been rigorously examined so far; the apparent contradiction that the consciousness "travels" in the "frozen" four-dimensional world - spacetime - is not an excuse because Weyl had surely been aware of it and nevertheless "went public" with his proposed resolution.

The Open World (TOC):

I. God and the Universe
II. Causality
III. Infinity

Mind and Nature (TOC):

I. Subjective Elements in Sense Perception
II. World and Consciousness
III. Constructive Character of Scientific Concepts and Theories
IV. Relativity
V. Subject and Object in Quantum Physics

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