History and Philosophy of Physics
One of Russia most prominent Enlightenment figures, Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765) was a polymath, scientist and writer, who made important contributions to physics, chemistry, astronomy, literature and education. Among his discoveries were…
An ultimate universal theory -- a complete theory that accounts, via few and simple first principles, for all the phenomena already observed and that will ever be observed -- has been, and still is, the aspiration of most physicists and…
"On February 16, 1951, at the atomic energy pilot plant on Huemul Island, San Carlos de Bariloche, thermonuclear reactions were carried out under control conditions on a technical scale." This is how Gral. Peron announced, on March 24,…
In this paper I formulate Minimal Requirements for Candidate Predictions in quantum field theories, inspired by viewing the standard model as an effective field theory. I then survey standard effective field theory regularization…
General relativity and quantum mechanics have both revealed the relativity of certain notions that were previously thought to be absolute. I clarify the precise sense in which these theories are relational, and I argue that the various…
The present essay provides a new metaphysical interpretation of Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM) in terms of mereological bundle theory. The essential idea is to claim that a physical system in RQM can be defined as a mereological fusion…
During the second world war, Canada made several important contributions to the wartime work of the Manhattan Project. The three main contributions were: establishing a domestic nuclear research laboratory in Montreal to investigate heavy…
It is well known that the problem of divergence in the physical interpretation of quantum mechanics originating from the uncertainty principle has not yet been resolved. Attempting to clear the constraints and confusion of this situation…
We are interested here in the program of reconstruction of quantum mechanics of the German physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizs\"{a}cker, which still has some supporters today. In the major part of this article, we limit…
With Cyrano, Voltaire, and Verne, France provided important milestones in the history of early science fiction. However, even if the genre was not very common a few centuries ago, there were numerous additional contributions by…
The Christy Gadget is the informal name for the plutonium device detonated in the Trinity test on July 16, 1945. In September 1944, Robert Christy, working in the theoretical implosion group, proposed a novel concept that altered the design…
The history and advances of neutronics calculations at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project through the present is reviewed. We briefly summarize early simpler, and more approximate neutronics methods. We then motivate the need to better…
New measurement and assessment techniques have been applied to the radiochemical re-evaluation of the Trinity Event. Thirteen trinitite samples were dissolved and analyzed using a combination of traditional decay counting methods and the…
The intent of this paper is to discuss the history and origins of Lagrangian hydrodynamic methods for simulating shock driven flows. The majority of the pioneering research occurred within the Manhattan Project. A range of Lagrangian…
We describe the wartime challenges associated with the rapid developments in plutonium chemistry and metallurgy that were necessary to produce the core of the Trinity Device. Beginning with microgram quantities of plutonium metal late in…
This article addresses shortcomings in the existing secondary literature describing the nature and involvement of computing at the World War II Los Alamos Lab. Utilizing rarely used source materials, and identifying points of bias among…
During the Manhattan project a simple formula was developed by Bethe and Feynman in 1943 to estimate the yield of a fission-only nuclear explosion of a uniformly-dense bare-sphere of supercritical fissile material. We have not found any…
As the Manhattan Project shifted to the theory of implosion assembly in 1944, plutonium was extremely rare and large uncertainties surrounded the function of the Gadget. For these reasons, a team within the Manhattan Project began another…
Criticality experiments with $^{235}$U (metal and hydride) and $^{239}$Pu (metal) were performed during the Manhattan Project. Results from these experiments provided necessary information for the success of the Manhattan Project. These…
On July 16, 1945, the Trinity nuclear test exploded in the desert near Alamogordo, NM. A variety of new diagnostic experiments were fielded in an effort to understand the detailed performance of the nuclear device. This article describes a…