Related papers: Die Erste Stunde (The first hour)
Since antiquity, from Euclid of Alexandria to Galileo Galilei to Immanuel Kant to Hermann Minkowksi to Albert Einstein, the question of the nature of space and time has occupied scientists and philosophers. In the four-dimensional…
Reviewing Piaget's psychology of reasoning by the mathematical educators of the Federal Republic of Germany late in the 1960th the concept of grouping has been understood similar to a mathematical structure. Possibly to consider empirical…
After a historical discussion of Einstein's 1907 principle of equivalence, a homogeneous gravitational field in Minkowski spacetime is constructed. It is pointed out that the reference frames in gravitational theory can be understood as…
There is an increasing recognition regarding of the importance of introducing modern Einsteinian concepts early in science education. This study investigates the efficacy of an innovative educational programme "Einstein-First", which…
This paper starts with a personal memoir of how some significant ideas arose and events took place during the period from 1972, when I first encountered Ted Bastin, to 1979, when I proposed the foundation of ANPA. I then discuss program…
We make a conceptual overview of a particular approach to the initial-value problem in canonical gauge theories. We stress how the first-class phase-space constraints may be relaxed if we interpret them as fixing the values of new degrees…
These are author's recollections of informal discussions on foundations of quantum mechanics, which happened in his presence in 1970-80s
Starting with Einstein's famous papers of 1905, we review some of the ensuing developments and their impact on present-day physics. We attempt to cover topics that are of interest to historians and philosophers of science as well as to…
Norbert Wiener and J.B.S. Haldane suggested during the early thirties that the profound changes in our conception of matter entailed by quantum theory opens the way for our thoughts, and other experiential or mind-like qualities, to play a…
In this essay, I discuss an interdisciplinary science that is just blossoming: that of geo-neutrinos. I begin with a couple of episodes from the history of thought, showing the deep roots of Earth science and its many connections with…
The de Sitter thermodynamics of cosmological models with a modified Friedmann equation is considered, with particular reference to high-energy Randall-Sundrum and Gauss-Bonnet braneworlds. The Friedmann equation can be regarded as the first…
In the period from about 1890 to 1915 an interdisciplinary and unifying research programme known as "cosmical physics" attracted much scientific and public attention. It typically included aspects of the earth sciences (such as magnetic…
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…
These are my personal impressions of the environment in which string theory was born, and what the important developments affecting my work were during the hadronic string era, 1968-1974. I discuss my motivations and concerns at the time,…
The information-theoretic point of view proposed by Leibniz in 1686 and developed by algorithmic information theory (AIT) suggests that mathematics and physics are not that different. This will be a first-person account of some doubts and…
It is not very well known that the philosopher Karl Popper has been one of the foremost critics of the orthodox interpretation of quantum physics for about six decades. This paper reconstructs in detail most of Popper's activities on…
I worked on String Theory over a period of five years during the First String Era, the most intellectually satisfying years of my scientific life. One of the early prospectors in the String Theory Mine, I was fortunate enough to contribute…
We propose a formulation of gravity theory in the form of a field theory in a flat space-time with a number of dimensions greater than four. Configurations of the field under consideration describe the splitting of this space-time into a…
Gunnar Nordstrom constructed the first relativistic theory of gravitation formulated in terms of interactions with a scalar field. It was an important precursor to Einstein's general theory of relativity a couple of years later. He was also…
One of the main activities in science teaching, and in particular in Physics teaching, is not only the discussion of both modern problems and problems which solution is an urgent matter. It means that the picture of an active and alive…