Related papers: Die Physikalische Sammlung (Physical Collection)
In the mid-19th century, both the laws of mechanics and thermodynamics were known, and both appeared fundamental. This was changed by Boltzmann and Gibbs, who showed that thermodynamics can be *derived*, by applying mechanics to very large…
We review, in a historical perspective, developments in physics which led to the emergence of unifying ideas and theories. Some attention is paid to the theoretical programme that started in the second decade of the XXth century and whose…
After mathematicians and physicists had learned that the structure of physical space was not necessarily Euclidean, it became conceivable that the global topological structure of space was non-trivial. In the context of the late 19th…
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…
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…
Free translation of the original abstract in Spanish: Some of the most relevant milestones due to, or instigated by, mathematicians concerning the creation, development and advances of Cosmology as a scientific discipline are presented and…
During a first St. Petersburg period Leonhard Euler, in his early twenties, became interested in the Basel problem: summing the series of inverse squares (posed by Pietro Mengoli in mid 17th century). In the words of Andre Weil (1989) "as…
Physics is based on probabilities as fundamental entities of a mathematical description. Expectation values of observables are computed according to the classical statistical rule. The overall probability distribution for one world covers…
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Ludwig Boltzmann explained how irreversible macroscopic laws, in particular the second law of thermodynamics, originate in the time-reversible laws of microscopic physics. Boltzmann's analysis,…
Whereas physics in the period from about 1880 to 1910 experienced a steady growth, it was also a revolutionary period in which the foundations of the physical world picture were criticized and reconsidered. Generally speaking, from about…
During the summer of 1837 Christian Ludwig Gerling, a former student of Carl Friedrich Gauss, organized the world wide first determination of a vertical deflection in longitude. From a mobile observatory at the Frauenberg close to Marburg…
Mathematics and its relation to the physical universe have been the topic of speculation since the days of Pythagoras. Several different views of the nature of mathematics have been considered: Realism - mathematics exists and is…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
Particle physics, when taught in the classroom or lecture theatre, suffers from a lack of practical experience by students. Thus, we describe the construction of a fully working small particle physics detector using state of the art…
Joseph-Nicolas Delisle was one of the most important scientists at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences during the first period when Euler was working there. Euler was helping him in his work on astronomy and in geography. In this…
I am presenting a first-ever scientific collection of short sayings on probability and statistics expressed by most various men of science, many classics included, from antiquity to Kepler to our time. Quite understandably, the reader will…
In this paper we continue the study, started in [1], of the operatorial formulation of classical mechanics given by Koopman and von Neumann (KvN) in the Thirties. In particular we show that the introduction of the KvN Hilbert space of…
Inspired by the one-hundredth anniversary of the seminal works of Stern and Gerlach, our contribution is a proposal of how to use their famous experiment in a more contemporary perspective. Our main idea is to re-cast the experiment in the…
At the beginning of the 20th century the classical electron theory (or, perhaps more appropriately, the classical electromagnetic mass theory) - the first physical theory that dared ask the question of what inertia and mass were - was…
Since 2016 the group known as `The Big Bang Collective' has brought High Energy Physics outreach to music and culture festivals across Europe, successfully engaging with and inspiring audiences who may never have sought this out themselves…