Alan Aversa
Alan Aversa | |
|---|---|
| Residence | Sierra Vista, AZ, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of Arizona |
| Known for | Aristotelian Thomism, inhomogeneous cosmology, triadic theory of elementary particle interactions, Helmholtz-Duhem theory, Ritz emission theory |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics, Astronomy, philosophy of science |
Alan Aversa is an American physicist, educator, and independent researcher based in Sierra Vista, Arizona. He works at the intersection of physics, astronomy, and the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy of nature, and is the English translator of Pierre Duhem's history-of-science study The Electric Theories of J. Clerk Maxwell.
Biography
Aversa earned a Bachelor of Science in physics and astronomy from the University of Arizona in 2008, with minors in mathematics and Italian. As an undergraduate he took part in the Arizona Space Grant Consortium's Undergraduate Research Internship program, working under astronomer Michael Meyer on a project titled "Distinguishing Stars and Planets: Disentangling the IMF and the Companion Mass Ratio Distribution."
He has since worked as an educator, substitute teacher, and tutor in physics, mathematics, and computer programming, including Linux, C, Python, Bash, and Mathematica. His writing and curatorial work focus on the relationship between medieval scholastic natural philosophy and modern science.
Work
Aversa maintains an "Aristotelian Thomism" resource page devoted to the philosophy of nature associated with Thomas Aquinas and the twentieth-century River Forest School, which holds that the natural sciences are epistemologically foundational. His commentary examines how Thomistic natural philosophy bears on modern physics, including interpretations of quantum mechanics, and offers critiques of scientism and purely mechanistic accounts of nature.
In the history of science, Aversa translated Pierre Duhem's Les théories électriques de J. Clerk Maxwell into English as The Electric Theories of J. Clerk Maxwell: A Historical and Critical Study, published by Springer in 2015 as volume 314 of the Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science series. He has also written on nineteenth-century theories of electricity and magnetism and on cosmology.
On the Natural Philosophy Wiki he is associated with topics including inhomogeneous cosmology, the triadic theory of elementary particle interactions, the Helmholtz-Duhem theory, and Ritz emission theory.