The Physicist’s Way: A Philosophical Guide to the Practice of Physics

A Nobel Prize–winning physicist illuminates how physicists think about and do physics What principles guide physicists’ ways of thinking and the practice and culture of the discipline? In The Physicist’s Way, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist P.J.E. Peebles argues that definite assumptions underpin the working physicist’s approach, the elements of which are learned organically by incoming generations of students and shared across the field. Peebles outlines these basic principles, elucidating how physicists apply their approach to a broad range of topics, from quantum physics to the physics of the expanding universe. After discussing physicists’ demanding tests of the fundamental theories of quantum physics and relativistic cosmology and how physicists think about the puzzling lack of consistency between the two, Peebles considers the sociology of the field and where physics might be headed. Engaging throughout with ideas developed by scientists, philosophers, and historians, he elucidates the unique place physics holds in the natural sciences for the ability to discover theories that make definite predictions that agree with what can be observed. The Physicist’s Way offers an enlightening perspective on how physicists think about and approach the practice of physics.