“the conflation of conceptual possibility with logical possibility. To Sadi Carnot, it is conceivable that there could be another world where heat and motion are not associated. To Richard Feynman, armed with specific knowledge of how to derive equations about heat from equations about motion, this idea is [...] so wildly inconsistent as to make one’s head explode.”
Shouldn’t we distinguish between logical and physical possibility? A world in which heat and motion are disassociated seems to be impossible in a rather different way than worlds in which the law of noncontradiction is false or 7,497 is prime are impossible.
Shouldn’t we distinguish between logical and physical possibility? A world in which heat and motion are disassociated seems to be impossible in a rather different way than worlds in which the law of noncontradiction is false or 7,497 is prime are impossible.