Related papers: Isaac Newton's sinister heraldry
We study how the paradigm of Newton's science, based on the organization of scientific knowledge as a series of mathematical laws, was definitively accepted in science courses - in the last decades of the XVIII century, in England as well…
In 1984, three telescopes in South America recorded an occultation of a star near Neptune. It was attributed to the existence of a partial ring or ring arc. The existence of ring arcs around Neptune was confirmed during subsequent years via…
Although practised as an art and science for ages, cryptography had to wait until the mid-twentieth century before Claude Shannon gave it a strong mathematical foundation. However, Shannon's approach was rooted is his own information…
We recount the successful long career of classical physics, from Newton to Einstein, which was based on the philosophy of scientific realism. Special emphasis is given to the changing status and number of ontological entitities and…
The study of non-Hermitian degeneracies -- called exceptional points -- has become an exciting frontier at the crossroads of optics, photonics, acoustics, and quantum physics. Here, we introduce the Newton polygon method as a general…
It is shown that the same phenomenological Newtonian model recently proposed by the author to explain the cosmological evolution of the fine structure constant suggests furthermore an explanation of the unmodelled acceleration $a_P\simeq…
It is known that Sir Isaac Newton suggested a date for the Passion of Christ in the posthumously published "Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John" (1733). What was not known is that the first attempts to…
We review the physics at the end of the nineteenth century and summarize the process of the establishment of Special Relativity by Albert Einstein in brief. Following in the giant's footsteps, we outline the scientific method which helps to…
In this article, we present a description of the \textit{apparatus} employed by Henry Cavendish, which in turn is actually a compendium of 17 complex experiments, to try to experimentally measure the universal gravitation constant,…
In 1687 Isaac Newton published PHILOSOPHI\AE \ NATURALIS PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA, where the classical analytic dynamics was formulated. But Newton also formulated a discrete dynamics, which is the central difference algorithm, known as the…
This article presents a brief review of some historical and philosophical aspects of Einstein's 1917 paper 'Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity', a landmark work that denoted the starting point of modern…
In honor of Alan Turing's hundredth birthday, I unwisely set out some thoughts about one of Turing's obsessions throughout his life, the question of physics and free will. I focus relatively narrowly on a notion that I call "Knightian…
Dark Energy is currently one of the biggest mysteries in science. In this article the origin of the concept is traced as far back as Newton and Hooke in the seventeenth century. Newton considered, along with the inverse square law, a force…
Chirality, or handedness, is a topic that is common in biology and chemistry, yet is rarely discussed in physics courses. We provide a way of introducing the topic in classical physics, and demonstrate the merits of its inclusion - such as…
This document gathers the notes of a 30-hour review course on gravitation, which I delivered in January 2018 and January 2019 at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences of Cameroon (AIMS-Cameroon). Its main goal is to propose a big…
James Chadwick is known for his discovery of the neutron. Many of his earlier findings and ideas in the context of weak and strong nuclear forces are much less known. This biographical sketch attempts to highlight the achievements of a…
Year 2005 was the World Year of Physics, and it was commemorated worldwide as the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's legendary works in which the foundations of at least three areas of modern physics were laid: statistical mechanics,…
A closer look (with hindsight) at Newtonian and relativistic kinematics reveals two things. Not surprisingly, Newtonian time remains the empty and artificial - albeit useful - figment it is known to be. Quite unexpectedly however it turns…
Newton's Principia is famous for its investigations of the inverse square force law for gravity. But in this book Newton also did something that remained little-known until fairly recently. He figured out what kind of central force exerted…
Newton's deduction of the inverse square law from Kepler's ellipse and area laws together with his "superb theorem" on the gravitation attraction of spherically symmetric bodies, are the major steps leading to the discovery of the law of…