History and Philosophy of Physics
We present preliminary results of the analysis of the precise spatial orientation of colonial Christian churches located in the city of Las Palmas, capital of the island of Gran Canaria (Spain), and its surroundings. Our sample consists of…
Some authors have argued that spacetime in general relativity should be given a radically different interpretation from the ones given to spacetime in other theories in virtue of it being a gauge theory. In this article I review this sort…
While Erwin Schroedinger's contributions to quantum mechanics and other areas of theoretical physics are very well known, his works as a poet and literary writer are usually ignored. In this paper I reconsider his poetry and refer to a few…
350 years from the 1676 announcement of the Roemer's discovery that light propagates with finite speed, we present our observations using eyes with telescopes having similar resolution compared to those in the late 17th century. We…
AI is accelerating physics discovery, but perhaps away from Einstein-level theory building. To understand this gap, we must recognize a striking trend: while being very successful, the most visible AI contributions to physics discovery…
The Faddeev--Popov procedure poses two conceptual puzzles. \emph{Puzzle~(1)}: if gauge-equivalent configurations represent the same physics, the quotient $\F/\G$ should suffice to compute physical amplitudes --- yet the procedure requires…
The construction of the DUMAND, Lake Baikal and IceCube detectors of high-energy neutrinos are discussed, with some emphasis on the difficulties encountered. The decade from 1990 marked the period in which the Auger Observatory was…
This paper argues that the geometry-first and symmetry-first formulations of gauge theory are not equivalent. They differ in three respects. First, the geometry-first formulation---in which gauge groups arise as automorphism groups of…
I argue that dimensional analysis can appropriately be thought of as a gauge theory. This picture naturally leads to the usual quantity calculus through inherent properties of Lie groups, Lie algebras, and representation theory. The gauge…
The Hoyle-Narlikar action-at-a-distance formulation for gravity remains one of the most mathematically rigorous attempts to incorporate Mach principle into physics. A lesser known, but no less significant, is the fact that it is also one of…
Hilbert-space techniques are widely used not only for quantum theory, but also for classical physics. Two important examples are the Koopman-von Neumann (KvN) formulation and the method of ``classical'' wave functions. As this paper…
I rivisit the history of the first matter-antimatter collider built in Italy in 1960 and carried to success through an inter-European collaboration with France, underlying the foundational role of the Austrian born theoretical physicist…
As a fundamental arena for the development of his dynamics, Newton postulated the existence of absolute space, in which bodies innately possess absolute velocity. Despite this, Newton argued that, although real, absolute properties cannot…
One of us is a realist and believes that reality fundamentally consists in an external physical world, governed by laws of physics. Observers are either emergent (physicalism) or exist in addition to physical reality. The other defends a…
Adversarial collaborations have become increasingly prominent in empirical science, where proponents of competing theories jointly design experiments capable of discriminating between them. Much less attention has been given to theoretical…
In 2019, the first image of a black hole's shadow based on observation was released by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHT). This paper shows that despite the EHT's emphasis on a single image as its final result, there were…
Amazonian earthworks, also called geoglyphs, are thousands of man-made earthen structures, mostly of geometrical shape, which progressively emerged from the tropical forest due to progressive deforestation. They were probably built between…
A. A. Friedmann (04.06.1888 -- 16.09.1925) proposed the first physical cosmological models in 1920s. Despite the fact that Friedmann's works were very famous soon after their publication, the study of dynamic models of the Universe in the…
Astroparticle physics emerged during the late twentieth century as a new interdisciplinary field at the intersection of particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. This article examines the historical mechanisms through which it took…
In AdS/CFT, one often finds claims along the lines that ``spacetime emerges from entanglement." This paper argues that behind these general statements hide three distinct emergence claims about, respectively, metric, gravitational dynamics,…