In July 2006, a major international conference was held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canada, to celebrate the career and work of a remarkable man of letters. Abner Shimony, who is well known for his pioneering contributions to foundations of quantum mechanics, is a physicist as well as a philosopher, and is highly respected among the intellectuals of both communities. In line with Shimony's conviction that philosophical investigation is not to be divorced from theoretical and empirical work in the sciences, the conference brought together leading theoretical physicists, experimentalists, as well as philosophers. This book collects twenty-three original essays stemming from the conference, on topics including history and methodology of science, Bell's theorem, probability theory, the uncertainty principle, stochastic modifications of quantum mechanics, and relativity theory. It ends with a transcript of a fascinating discussion between Lee Smolin and Shimony, ranging over the entire spectrum of Shimony's wide-ranging contributions to philosophy, science, and philosophy of science.

In July 2006, a major international conference was held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canada, to celebrate the career and work of a remarkable man of letters. Abner Shimony, who is well known for his pioneering contributions to foundations of quantum mechanics, is a physicist as well as a philosopher, and is highly respected among the intellectuals of both communities. In line with Shimony's conviction that philosophical investigation is not to be divorced from theoretical and empirical work in the sciences, the conference brought together leading theoretical physicists, experimentalists, as well as philosophers. This book collects twenty-three original essays stemming from the conference, on topics including history and methodology of science, Bell's theorem, probability theory, the uncertainty principle, stochastic modifications of quantum mechanics, and relativity theory. It ends with a transcript of a fascinating discussion between Lee Smolin and Shimony, ranging over the entire spectrum of Shimony's wide-ranging contributions to philosophy, science, and philosophy of science.

A remarkable concept known as "entanglement" in quantum physics requires an incredibly bizarre link between subatomic particles. When one such particle is observed, quantum entanglement demands the rest of them to be affected instantaneously, even if they are universes apart. Einstein called this "spooky actions at a distance," and argued that such bizarre predictions of quantum theory show that it is an incomplete theory of nature. In 1964, however, John Bell proposed a theorem which seemed to prove that such spooky actions at a distance are inevitable for any physical theory, not just quantum theory. Since then many experiments have confirmed these long-distance correlations. But now, in this groundbreaking collection of papers, the author exposes a fatal flaw in the logic and mathematics of Bell's theorem, thus undermining its main conclusion, and proves that---as suspected by Einstein all along---there are no spooky actions at a distance in nature. The observed long-distance correlations among subatomic particles are dictated by a garden-variety "common cause," encoded within the topological structure of our ordinary physical space itself.

This book develops an Effective Theory of Quantum Gravity based on the two pillars of physics - namely, General Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. It opens up a new direction of research in the search for a quantum theory of gravity, by first exactly quantizing the Newton-Cartan-Schrodinger theory of non-relativistic gravity, and then special relativizing the quantized theory by invoking Mach's Principle in the case of the universe and Schwarzschild radius in the case of massive stars and black holes. The main technique employed for the latter task is a variational technique using a trial local density. Subodha Mishra is a Professor of Physics at the Institute of Technical Education and Research, Bhubaneswar, India. He has two doctoral degrees in Physics; one from University of Missouri-Columbia, USA, and the other from Institute of Physics, India. His research interests are in theoretical physics; especially in theoretical condensed matter physics and cosmology. Joy Christian is a Researcher at the Department of Physics and Wolfson College of the University of Oxford, UK. He received his doctoral degree in Foundations of Physics from Boston University, USA, and has been a Visiting Professor at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canada. His main research interests are in the foundations of quantum and gravitational physics, with an outlook towards a theory of quantum gravity.