Related papers: Aristotle: The first encyclopedist
Einstein was in many ways like a detective on a mystery trail, though in his case he was on the trail of nature's mysteries and not some murder mystery! And like all good detectives he had a style. It consisted of taking facts that he knew…
Supportive attitudes can bring to a blossoming science, while neglect can quickly make science absent from everyday life and provide a very primitive view of the world. We compare one important Greek achievement, the computation of the…
According to Aristotle "time is the number of change with respect to the before and after". That's certainly a vague concept, but at the same time it's both simple and satisfying from a philosophical point of view: things do not change…
I offer a revisionist interpretation of Galileo's role in the history of science. My overarching thesis is that Galileo lacked technical ability in mathematics, and that this can be seen as directly explaining numerous aspects of his life's…
Astronomy is a precise and relatively simple science because objects accelerate in a gravitational field at the same rate, irrespective of their composition. Galileo knew this, and Einstein took it as the basis for general relativity.…
This paper has two goals. The first goal is to show how an extension of second-order logic is a natural framework to formalize portions of Aristotle's \emph{Topics} and to bring to the foreground the logical, linguistic and philosophical…
This note is based upon a talk given at a celebration in Austin Texas of the achievements of J. Willard Gibbs. J. Willard Gibbs, the younger, was the first American physical sciences theorist. He was one of the inventors of statistical…
I reflect on some of the basic aspects of present day Beyond the Standard Model particle physics, focusing mostly on the issues of naturalness, in particular on the so-called hierarchy problem. To all of us, physics as natural science…
Albert Einstein's practice in physics and his philosophical positions gradually reoriented themselves from more empiricist towards rationalist viewpoints. This change accompanied his turn towards unified field theory and different…
Robert Grosseteste was one of the most prominent thinkers of the Thirteenth Century. Philosopher and scientist, he proposed a metaphysics based on the propagation of light. In this framework, he gave a cosmology too. Here we will discuss…
Historically, Ehrenfest's theorem (1927) is the first one which shows that classical physics can emerge from quantum physics as a kind of approximation. We recall the theorem in its original form. Next, we highlight its generalizations to…
Pythagoras' theorem lies at the heart of physics as well as mathematics, yet its historical origins are obscure. We highlight a purely pictorial, gestalt-like proof that may have originated during the Zhou Dynasty. Generalizations of the…
Aristotelian logic and its related traditions in antiquity are often held to have been equivalent to monadic predicate logic and as such inadequate to formalize mathematics as well as scientific and philosophical discourse in general. In…
Causality is one of the most fundamental -- and yet elusive -- concepts in physics. From its intuitive role in everyday experience to its formal and often implicit role in scientific theories, causality has challenged philosophers and…
Entropy is a quantity which is of great importance in physics and chemistry. The concept comes out of thermodynamics, proposed by Rudolf Clausius in his analysis of Carnot cycle and linked by Ludwig Boltzmann to the number of specific ways…
We answer the question: who first proved that $C/d$ is a constant? We argue that Archimedes proved that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is a constant independent of the circle and that the circumference constant…
The evolution of theoretical physics in the XX century differs significantly from that in XVII-XIX centuries. While continuous progress is observed for theoretical physics in XVII-XIX centuries, modern physics contains many questions that…
It is shown that the correct expressions for momentum and kinetic energy of a particle moving at high speed were already implicit in physics going back to Maxwell. The demonstration begins with a thought experiment of Einstein by which he…
Both Albert Einstein and Erwin Schr\"{o}dinger have defined what science is. Einstein includes not only physics, but also all natural sciences dealing with both organic and inorganic processes in his definition of science. According to…
The rich body of physical theories defines the foundation of our understanding of the world. Its mathematical formulation is based on classical Aristotelian (binary) logic. In the philosophy of science the ambiguities, paradoxes, and the…