Over 10,000 hits

Dear reader, there’s some reason to celebrate: a few days ago we passed the mark of 10,000 hits since the beginning of the year when this blog started (the official kickoff was on 16 December 2009, but the first real post was only published on 11 February 2010). This means 34 hits per day on average for Taking up Spacetime–a pretty good start. If there is one thing that I have learned from doing Taking up Spacetime, it’s that the philosophy of physics community is much larger than I thought it was, and that there are many more people interested in it from what I had imagined. Cool!

Of course, I will continue to improve the content by having more posts and more posts on recently debated issues in the philosophy of physics or thoughts I have about things I am working on. If you would like to see something different from what we have so far, or more (or less, for that matter) of something we already do, please let me know!

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New Page: Library

I have just added a new page to this blog. It’s a very inchoate attempt to list the major works in philosophy of physics over the last thirty or so years. The reason I did this is because I wanted to see a bit more systematically which publishers published most of these works. Unsurprisingly, CUP and OUP are clearly the most copious publishers, followed by Kluwer and Springer. But since this may be the result of some selection bias, I would like to encourage you to send me proposals for additions to this very incomplete list. Please email them or leave them as comments!

Update (14 September 2010):

Sam Fletcher has pointed out many omissions in the list; thanks to him for taking the time to give me a long list of titles.

Eventually, I would like to make the bibliographic data fully searchable, and not just listed as a dumb list of books ordered by publisher. Perhaps the best things would be to make them available as a .bib file. Any suggestions? Anyone any experience with how this might be implemented directly in the web design?

New authors: Manchak and Smeenk

Until very recently, I have been the only author on this blog. But two others have joined me now: I am very happy to welcome

John Manchak, University of Washington, username “manchak”
Chris Smeenk, University of Western Ontario, username “smeenk”

as occasional authors on Taking up Spacetime. I am very much looking forward to their contributions!

P.S.: From now on, the author of a post will be identified by an additional category shown at the end of the post.

Over 100 visitors today!

According to the automated statistics of the site, Taking up Spacetime has had 146 visitors today, the first day in its history with more than one hundred visitors in one day! This is great news, although still a long shot from the ten million visitors announced by the Leiter Report about ten days ago… Thanks to Bryan Roberts at Soul Physics and Greg Frost-Arnold at Obscure and Confused Ideas for linking to Taking up Spacetime.

New photograph

Just added a new photograph to the header, by kind permission of Jonathan Cohen. I will add a line with the appropriate credit once I figured out how… Until then: thanks, Jonathan!

Welcome!

This is the official kick off to the world’s first blog dedicated to the philosophy of physics!

I plan to post conference announcements, job openings, information for graduate students, my own ramblings on problems in the philosophy of physics that keep me awake, discussions of recent or forthcoming publications, and similar things more.

The guiding idea is that this blog will develop over time to become a marketplace for philosophers of physics where to trade ideas and information.