History and Philosophy of Physics
The paper shows how the Bohmian approach to quantum physics can be applied to develop a clear and coherent ontology of non-perturbative quantum gravity. We suggest retaining discrete objects as the primitive ontology also when it comes to a…
William Oliver Martin published "The Order and Integration of Knowledge" in 1957 to address the problem of the nature and the order of various kinds of knowledge; in particular, the theoretical problem of how one kind of knowledge is…
Expository paper providing a historical survey of the gradual transformation of the "philosophical discussions" between Bohr, Einstein and Schr\"odinger on foundational issues in quantum mechanics into a quantitative prediction of a new…
This is a brief account of the legacy of Ken Wilson in statistical physics, high energy physics, computing and education.
This paper describes the history of experimental neutrino physics in the physics department of Rome Sapienza University
Kenneth G. Wilson made deep and insightful contributions to statistical physics, particle physics, and related fields. He was also a helpful and thoughtful human being.
The traditional cultures of Aboriginal Australians include a significant astronomical component, perpetuated through oral tradition, ceremony, and art. This astronomical component includes a deep understanding of the motion of objects in…
This is an editorial note to accompany printing as a Golden Oldie in the Journal of General Relativity and Gravitation of the fundamental article by Georges Lema\^itre first published in French in 1927, in which the author provided the…
In 1904, the year before Einstein's seminal papers on special relativity, Austrian physicist Fritz Hasenohrl examined the properties of blackbody radiation in a moving cavity. He calculated the work necessary to keep the cavity moving at a…
In 1651 Giovanni Riccioli reported the earliest accurate measurements the acceleration due to gravity, g, from pendulum-timed free fall experiments. The use of Huygens' pendulum formula (published 1673) allows one to deduce the pendulum…
Superfluids and superconductors are ordinary matter that show a very surprising behavior at low temperatures. As their temperature is reduced, materials of both kinds can abruptly fall into a state in which they will support a persistent,…
At the end of the 19th century light was regarded as an electromagnetic wave propagating in a material medium called ether. The speed c appearing in Maxwell's wave equations was the speed of light with respect to the ether. Therefore,…
The aim of this essay is to propose a conception of mathematics that is fully consonant with naturalism. By that I mean the hypothesis that everything that exists is part of the natural world, which makes up a unitary whole.
Diffeomorphism invariance is sometimes taken to be a criterion of background independence. This claim is commonly accompanied by a second, that the genuine physical magnitudes (the "observables") of background-independent theories and those…
We re-examine the long-standing problem of the date of the Cassiopeia A supernova (SN), in view of recent claims that it might be the 1630 "noon-star" seen at the birth of King Charles II. We do not support this identification, based on the…
The article gives an overview on early cosmic-ray work, published in German in the period from around 1910 to about 1940.
Donati's comet was one of the most impressive astronomical events of the nineteenth century. Its extended sword-like tail was a spectacular sight that inspired several literary and artistic representations. Traces of Donati's comet are…
In a recent paper Sule et al. (Astronomical Notes, vol. 332 (2011), 655) argued that an early 17th-century Indian mural of the constellation Sagittarius with a dragon-headed tail indicated that the bright supernova of 1604 was also sighted…
A comparative study is undertaken that brings to light the two different methods of how to treat the many-body problem in quantum field theory. The two main researchers who published the first versions of how to quantize a many-body…
We review in this article the role which the work of Pauli and Weisskopf played in formulating a quantum field theory of spinless particles. To make our computations as transparent as possible, we offer a physicist's derivation of the…