History and Philosophy of Physics
The Hubble law, widely considered the first observational basis for the expansion of the universe, may in the future be known as the Hubble-Lema\^itre law. This is what the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union…
The need for revolution in modern physics is a well known and often broached subject, however, the precision and success of current models narrows the possible changes to such a great degree that there appears to be no major change…
Using the example of classical electrodynamics, I argue that the concept of fields as mediators of particle interactions is fundamentally flawed and reflects a misguided attempt to retrieve Newtonian concepts in relativistic theories. This…
This is a personal and admittedly US-centric attempt to summarize the foundational impact of the Pisa CDF Group on the conceptual design, construction, and early operation of the CDF Detector at Fermilab. I have tried to go back to original…
A non-relativistic theory of inertia based on Mach's principle is presented as has been envisaged but not achieved by Ernst Mach in 1872. Central feature is a space-dependent, anisotropic, symmetric inert mass tensor.
The paper defines a new coordinate system that was developed in 1977-78 for the world's first digital synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ground processor for images from the Seasat-A satellite. The coordinate system is for the range-Doppler…
Dedicated to the centenary of the Ioffe Institute, the article contains the shortest review of scientific achievements of the theorists of the institute during this time. We concentrate mainly on research in the field of elementary particle…
This paper is a small step towards the goal of constructing a coherent theory of physic and mathematics together. It is based on two ideas, the localization of mathematical systems in space or space time, and the separation of the concepts…
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Austrian (later naturalized American) Victor Hess among others developed a brilliant line of research, leading to the final determination of the extraterrestrial origin of part of the…
I recall my interactions with Julian Schwinger, first as a graduate student at Harvard, and then as a postdoc at UCLA, in the period 1968--81, and subsequently. Some aspects of his legacy to physics are discussed.
The Gibbs Paradox is essentially a set of open questions as to how sameness of gases or fluids (or masses, more generally) are to be treated in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. They have a variety of answers, some restricted to…
Recently, a widely publicized claim has been made that the Aboriginal Australians discovered the variability of the red star Betelgeuse in the modern Orion, plus the variability of two other prominent red stars: Aldebaran and Antares. This…
In these shorts notes I want to remembermy relationship with GianCarlo Ghirardi, who was my supervisor in my Master Degree in Physics at the University of Trieste and then he became a very deep and close friend. I don't want to describe in…
Isaac Newton's book 'Opticks' from the 18th century includes several hypotheses on the structure of matter. Most of the hypotheses were confirmed during the 19th and 20th centuries at the scale of atoms and molecules. Conflicts appear…
We present reconstructed sunspot positions based on observations reported in letters between Gottfried Kirch and other contemporary astronomers from AD 1680 to 1709, i.e. in the last decades of the Maunder Minimum. The letters were compiled…
Sunspot observations with telescopes in 18th century were carried out in Japan as well. One of these sunspot observations is recorded in an account called Sansaizusetsu narabini Kansei irai Jissoku Zusetsu (Charts of Three Worlds and…
Frank W. J. Hekking performed his PhD work on "Aspects of Electron Transport in Semiconductor Nanostructures" at the TU Delft in 1992. He then worked as a postdoc at the University of Karlsruhe, the University of Minnesota, the Cavendish…
The cosmological constant was proposed 100 years ago in order to make the model of static Universe, imagined then by most scientists, possible. Today it is the main candidate for the physical essence causing the observed accelerated…
Observables have a dual nature in both classical and quantum kinematics: they are at the same time \emph{quantities}, allowing to separate states by means of their numerical values, and \emph{generators of transformations}, establishing…
Almost half a century before Einstein expounded his general theory of relativity, the English mathematician William Kingdon Clifford argued that space might not be Euclidean and proposed that matter is nothing but a small distortion in that…