Related papers: How a fake Kepler portrait became iconic

Jacobus C. Kapteyn is regarded as one of the coryfees of the University of Groningen. Part of his legacy is two paintings of him by Dutch painter Jan Pieter Veth. One, showing him at his desk, decorates the Kapteyn Room in the Kapteyn…

Kepler's primary mission is a search for earth-size exoplanets in the habitable zone of late-type stars using the transit method. To effectively accomplish this mission, Kepler orbits the Sun and stares nearly continuously at one…

This paper deals with the ways that the issue of completing quantum mechanics was brought into laboratories and became a topic in mainstream quantum optics. It focuses on the period between 1965, when Bell published what now we call Bell's…

In 1710, George Berkeley, philospher and scientist, discovered that the directions in which we see (sightlines) are tilted 45 degrees towards the past from the directions in which we look. Looking north from the 3-d present we see to the…

Duerer's engraving ``MELENCOLIA I'' was circulated in two versions not previously distinguished. Besides their conspicuous early Renaissance scientific instruments and tools, they contain numerous apparently unreported concealments whose…

Quantum mechanics represents one of the greatest triumphs of human intellect and, undoubtedly, is the most successful physical theory we have to date. However, since its foundation about a century ago, it has been uninterruptedly the center…

Art history linked some early 20th Century avant-garde visual art movements to contemporary systems of ideas in mathematics and theoretical physics. One of the proposed connections is the one that might have existed between Cubism and…

Perhaps more than any other of the physical sciences, cosmology exemplifies the inevitable contact between science and philosophy, including the problem of the demarcation criteria that distinguish science from non-science. Although modern…

Einstein became world-famous on 7 November 1919, following press publication of a meeting held in London on 6 November 1919 where the results were announced of two British expeditions led by Eddington, Dyson and Davidson to measure how much…

In this paper we propose and analyse a Gedankenexperiment involving three non-linear crystals and two objects inserted in the idler beams. We show that, besides the behaviour that can be extrapolated from previous experiments involving two…

Art authentication has historically established itself as a task requiring profound connoisseurship of one particular artist. Nevertheless, famous art forgers such as Wolfgang Beltracchi were able to deceive dozens of art experts. In recent…

This is a philosophy paper rather than mathematical physics work. I will publish it in some other place.

Deep neural networks have become remarkably good at producing realistic deepfakes, images of people that (to the untrained eye) are indistinguishable from real images. Deepfakes are produced by algorithms that learn to distinguish between…

With each passing year, the young Albert Einstein's achievements in physics in the year 1905 seem to be ever more miraculous. We describe why the centenary of this remarkable year is worthy of celebration.

The Olbers conjecture, that under reasonable assumptions, light from the stars should sum at the Earth to make the sky bright at night, has been a subject of study since the early 19th century. It has been incorporated into some of modern…

This meeting is entitled "A Century of Cosmology." But most of the papers being given here are based on work done very recently and there is really no attempt being made to critically review what has taken place in the last 90 or 100 years.…

The (yet-to-be confirmed) discovery of a Neptune-sized moon around the ~3.2 Jupiter-mass planet in Kepler 1625 puts interesting constraints on the formation of the system. In particular, the relatively wide orbit of the moon around the…

A recent essay [1] reminds us of how richly Boltzmann deserves to be admiringly commemorated for the originality of his ideas on the occasion of his 150th birthday. Without any doubt, the scientific community owes Boltzmann a great debt of…

Despite its central role in modern cosmology, doubts are often expressed as to whether cosmological inflation is really a falsifiable theory. We distinguish two facets of inflation, one as a theory of initial conditions for the hot big bang…

Donati's comet was one of the most impressive astronomical events of the nineteenth century. Its extended sword-like tail was a spectacular sight that inspired several literary and artistic representations. Traces of Donati's comet are…