PHILIP H. THONEMANN'S HOME PAGES

 

The Mill Hill School science pages are now here

Here is the link to our A-level Physics Revision Course.

 

Philosophy of Science

1. The methodology is best entered via this map.  I hope that it is self-explanatory.   There is an essay on Realism.  (There is also a bibliography, which is fragmentary...)

2.  ' Chance And Degree Of Belief '. I've received some encouraging comments, and some helpful criticisms, on an earlier version of this paper.   Testing Chances is a more detailed defence of the view that Cournot's Rule, and the Principal Principle, are versions of the inductive presupposition - and therefore describe, but cannot justify, the best consensus methods that we have for testing chancy hypotheses. 

PURE PHILOSOPHY

  The Private Language Argument. (I argue that this is based on persuasive definition of the word 'language')

   If you have comments on any of the following papers, I would be very grateful to receive them.  I am aiming to improve them as a result of such comments, to append a 'Version History', and to credit those who have contributed. I've already done this with the 'Chance And Degree Of Belief' paper. You can email me.

SECONDARY EDUCATION

   This essay is a version of the presentation that I made as part of the 2003 Popper Debate at the LSE.  The debate was on "Educating the Scientist"; my essay concerns the education of potential physicists at secondary level. (A Word document)  It covers the problem of lack of specialist Physics teachers, the effect of this (sometimes mistakenly regarded as the effect of faulty curricula), the good developments in curricula, and the need for maximum transferability to go with maximum differentiation.

 

DANGER Students should remember that people's Home Pages are not peer-assessed in the way that academic papers in journals, and books, are. Peer-assessment is an important method for distinguishing mainstream, academically sound, investigators from the inhabitants of the fringe areas: cranks, routine thinkers, and - it has to be said - geniuses. Indeed, it is one of the justifiable methods adopted by the best investigators (see 'The Methods of Physics'). Furthermore, since the papers have not been paper-published, your teacher has probably not read them. The papers linked to this page therefore come with an intellectual, and educational, health warning: Do not include any of these ideas in your work without first checking with your teacher.