Related papers: How a fake Kepler portrait became iconic
A critical review of frequency-shift phenomena a la Doppler effect is presented. The importance of Fermi's theory of 1932 is pointed out, and it is argued that there exists a gap in our understanding of this phenomena at a fundamental…
How did it all begin? Although this question has undoubtedly lingered for as long as humans have walked the Earth, the answer still eludes us. Yet since my grandparents were born, scientists have been able to refine this question to a…
Published between 1760 and 1770, Bielfeld's writings prove that scholars of the time were acquainted with the concepts of both political arithmetic and German statistik, long before they merged into a new discipline at the beginning the…
In 1964-1974, the German artist Max Ernst created, with the help of two friends, a series of works (books, movie, paintings) related to the astronomer Wilhelm Tempel. Mixing actual texts by Tempel and artistic features, this series pays…
The Talbot effect, also referred to as self-imaging or lensless imaging, was originally discovered in the 1830's by Henry Fox Talbot. Over the years, various investigators have found different aspects of this phenomenon, and a theory of the…
Prior to the 1990s, speculations about the occurrence of planets around other stars were based only on planet formation theory, observations of circumstellar disks, and the knowledge that at least one seemingly ordinary star had managed to…
During the 17th century the idea of an orbiting and rotating Earth became increasingly popular, but opponents of this view continued to point out that the theory had observable consequences that had never, in fact, been observed. Why, for…
A test on quantum mechanics proposed long ago by Karl Popper is reconsidered with further detail and new insight. An ambiguity in the proposal, which turns out to be essential in order to make the test conclusive, is identified and taken…
This article has a twofold purpose. On the one hand I would like to draw attention to some nice exercises on the Kepler laws, due to Otto Laporte from 1970. Our discussion here has a more geometric flavour than the original analytic…
What is the shape of the Universe? Is it finite or infinite ? Is space multi-connected to create ghost images of faraway cosmic sources? After a "dark age" period, the field of cosmic topology has now become one of the major concerns in…
The Image Conjecture was formulated by the third author, who showed that it implied his Vanishing Conjecture, which is equivalent to the famous Jacobian Conjecture. We prove various cases of the Image Conjecture and show how it leads to…
The NASA Kepler mission -in flight since March 2009- is producing an enormous number of high-quality continuous light curves. Now, and for the first time ever, we are able to do ensemble asteroseismology, i.e., to do an asteroseismic…
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…
Johannes Kepler described the Copernican universe as consisting of a central, small, brilliant sun with its planetary system, all surrounded by giant stars. These stars were far larger than, and much dimmer than, the sun -- his De Stella…
The alleged use of Keplerian telescopes by Fabio Colonna (1567-1640), in Naples, since as early as October 1614, as claimed in some recent papers, is shown to be in fact untenable and due to a misconception.
When identifying instruments that have had great influence on the history of physics, none comes to mind more quickly than the pendulum. Though 'birthed' by Galileo in the 16th century, and in some respects nearly 'dead' by the middle of…
We investigate the contentions that Jackson Pollock's drip paintings are fractals produced by the artist's Levy distributed motion and that fractal analysis may be used to authenticate works of uncertain provenance[1-5]. We find that the…
The concept of photon is not necessary only applied to the relativistic Doppler theory. It may also work well for classical theory. As conservation of momentum and energy are physical laws, if applying these laws gives the exact…
This paper summarises briefly and in English some of the results of the book Hoffmann: Hipparchs Himmelsglobus, Springer, 2017 that had to be written in German. The globe of Hipparchus is not preserved. For that reason, it has been a source…
Einstein's sink is a well-known object among physics and astronomy students at Leiden University. Stories about its origin have been passed down since it was moved to the large lecture room of the then newly built Oort Building in 1998.…