History and Philosophy of Physics
Work published in Sky and Telescope in 2004 discusses Galileo's observations of the star Mizar. These observations raise questions regarding Galileo's assumptions about the universe and the conclusions he drew from his observations. Galileo…
Poincar\'e held the view that geometry is a convention and cannot be tested experimentally. This position was apparently refuted by the general theory of relativity and the successful confirmation of its predictions; unfortunately,…
The largest failure of the old, Bohr-Sommerfeld quantum theory was with the helium atom. It brought about the theory's demise. I show that this failure does not originate, as commonly believed, with the orbit concept per se. Instead, it was…
This paper follows up a recent debate as to whether classical electrodynamics is inconsistent. I suggest that disagreements can be managed by disambiguating 'theory' in two different ways.
In the course of the years the names of Korteweg and de Vries have come to be closely associated. The equation which is named after them plays a fundamental role in the theory of non-linear partial differential equations. What are the…
The observation of the nature and world represents the main source of human knowledge on the basis of our reason. At the present it is also the use of precise measurement approaches, which may contribute significantly to the knowledge of…
A recent essay [1] reminds us of how richly Boltzmann deserves to be admiringly commemorated for the originality of his ideas on the occasion of his 150th birthday. Without any doubt, the scientific community owes Boltzmann a great debt of…
We analyze some of Einstein's failures to accomplish tasks which he posed to himself, notably deterministic interpretation of Quantum mechanics and formulation of the Unified theory of physical interactions, putting them into broader…
In 1909, Einstein derived a formula for the mean square energy fluctuation in black-body radiation. This formula is the sum of a wave term and a particle term. In a key contribution to the 1925 Dreimaennerarbeit with Born and Heisenberg,…
The mentioned article was written by Ettore Majorana, in a partially educational way, for a journal of Sociology; but he gave up publishing it (and threw it away). It appeared posthumous, thanks to Giovanni Gentile Jr. (the inventor of…
The Einstein-Rupp experiments were proposed in 1926 by Albert Einstein to study the wave versus particle nature of light. Einstein presented a theoretical analysis of these experiments to the Berlin Academy together with results of Emil…
We discuss a number of fundamental aspects of modern cosmological concepts, from the phenomenological, observational, theoretical and epistemic points of view. We argue that the modern cosmology, despite a great advent, in particular in the…
In 1926 Emil Rupp published a number of papers on the interference properties of light emitted by canal ray sources. These articles, particularly one paper that came into being in collaboration with Albert Einstein, drew quite some…
As it is well-known, the year 2005 has been the centenary of the "annus mirabilis" (1905) during which Albert Einstein published four fundamental papers of his. But already in 1979, for the centenary of Einstein's birth, the world…
In this article we review some key time cycles in ancient Indian astronomy, especially those that have emerged from researches in the past couple of decades expressing knowledge of the changing frame of earth's axis. The article also…
We review in the present article the conjecture of electromagnetic mass by Lorentz. The philosophical perspectives and historical accounts of this idea are described, especially, in the light of Einstein's special relativistic formula {E =…
The nature of the scientific method is controversial with claims that a single scientific method does not even exist. However the scientific method does exist. It is the building of logical and self consistent models to describe nature. The…
We consider Einstein's attitude with regard to religion both from sociological and epistemological points of view. An attempt to put it into a wider socio-historical perspective has been made, with the emphasis on his ethnic and religious…
In the year 1957, when interest in Einstein's unified field theory was fading away for lack of understanding of its physical content, Treder performed a momentous critical analysis of the possible definitions of the electric four-current in…
This is a detailed, day by day, account of Albert Einstein's activities, both social and scientific, during his 30-day stay in Argentina in 1925, including his lectures on relativity at the various local universities and his visit to the…