History and Philosophy of Physics
In 1827, Colladon carried out a series of experiments in Lac Leman (Lake Geneva, Switzerland) to measure the speed of sound in water. The purpose of our contribution is to treat this measurement as an inverse problem, and show, by theory…
Contributed paper to the Conference "Francesco's Legacy: Star Formation in Space and Time", in memory of Francesco Palla (1954-2016), held in Florence, June 5-9, 2017
We describe the main scientific developments that lead LIGO project to the detection of the gravitational waves: general relativity, black holes and gravitational waves predictions; numerical relativity and the collision and coalescence…
J. Willard Gibbs' Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics was the definitive work of one of America's greatest physicists. Gibbs' book on statistical mechanics establishes the basic principles and fundamental results that have…
Introduction for a special issue of Physica E dedicated to the memory of Markus B\"uttiker.
In the last two decades recurrence plots (RPs) were introduced in many different scientific disciplines. It turned out how powerful this method is. After introducing approaches of quantification of RPs and by the study of relationships…
We study ancient Khmer ephemerides described in 1910 by the French engineer Faraut, in order to determine whether they rely on observations carried out in Cambodia. These ephemerides were found to be of Indian origin and have been adapted…
We address the relation between two apparently distinct problems: The quest for a deeper understanding of the nature of consciousness and the search for time and space as emergent structures in the quantum mechanical world. We also advance…
This is the first complete English translation of Oratio De Meteoris Vi Electrica Ortis - seminal work of the great Russian polymath Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765). It was presented at the public meeting of the St.Petersburg Academy of…
In this paper, we are discussing the effect of the use of magnetic compasses on the orientation of ancient Chinese architectonical complexes. As Czech researchers proposed in 2011, assuming these complexes ideally oriented by the ancient…
Information theory is increasingly invoked by physicists concerned with fundamental physics, including black hole physics. But to what extent is the application of information theory in those contexts legitimate? Using the case of black…
We will follow the growth of gravitational theory in Germany from 1915 to the 1990s, i.e., relativistic theories of gravitation, mainly Einstein's, as a branch of physics in the sense of social, more precisely institutional history. As…
In "On the Heavens" Aristotle criticizes the Pythagorean point of view which claims the existence of a cosmic music and a cosmic sound. According to the Pythagorean argument, there exists a cosmic music produced by stars and planets. These…
We give an introductory review of gauge/gravity duality, and associated ideas of holography, emphasising the conceptual aspects. The opening Sections gather the ingredients, viz. anti-de Sitter spacetime, conformal field theory and string…
The object of this interview is the history of the Large Hadron Collider in the LEP tunnel at CERN, from first ideas to the discovery of the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson, seen from the point of view of a member of CERN scientific committees,…
The Italian civil nuclear projects had a very early origin, with the first ideas originating as far back as 1945. The construction of the first three plants dated back to the period 1956-1964, and at that time Italy ranked third in the…
Aboriginal Australians carefully observe the properties and positions of stars, including both overt and subtle changes in their brightness, for subsistence and social application. These observations are encoded in oral tradition. I examine…
In a way similar to classical mechanics where we have the concept of inertial time as expressed in the motions of bodies, in the (special) theory of relativity we can regard the inertial time as the only notion of time at play. The inertial…
Dennis Dieks advanced the view that the idea of flow of time is implemented in the theory of relativity. The 'flow' results from the successive happening/becoming of events along the time-like worldline of a material system. This leads to a…
According to conventional wisdom, presentism is at odds with the theory of relativity. This is supposed to be shown quite simply just by considering the relativity of simultaneity. In this paper I will show that conventional wisdom is…