物理学史与哲学

A. A. Friedmann (04.06.1888 -- 16.09.1925) proposed the first physical cosmological models in 1920s. Despite the fact that Friedmann's works were very famous soon after their publication, the study of dynamic models of the Universe in the…

Astroparticle physics emerged during the late twentieth century as a new interdisciplinary field at the intersection of particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. This article examines the historical mechanisms through which it took…

In AdS/CFT, one often finds claims along the lines that ``spacetime emerges from entanglement." This paper argues that behind these general statements hide three distinct emergence claims about, respectively, metric, gravitational dynamics,…

This article reads two recent tractatus-style texts - Niccolo Covoni and Carlo Rovelli's Tractatus Quanticus (arXiv:2512.06034) and Mikolaj Sienicki and Krzysztof Sienicki's Tractatus de Conscientia (arXiv:2607.05459) - together with Jenann…

The purpose of this study is to determine the role of the Academy of Gondishapur in the formation of the Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) in Baghdad and the emergence of Islamic science in the 8th-10th centuries. The methodology combines…

The two-times problem asks how the directed, oriented time of biological and conscious systems relates to the time of fundamental physics. The Evolving Block Universe, in which spacetime grows along Ricci eigenlines through an irreversible…

We investigate the epistemic opacity of computer simulations and machine learning methods in the context of black hole imaging. We argue that there are forms of opacity-including opacity resulting from the use of machine learning-which do…

In the early-mid 1990s, scientists emigrating from the former Soviet Union to the United States -- especially physicists, engineers, chemists, and biologists -- frequently secured prestigious and visible positions, including professorships,…

The canonical formulation of physical theories with irregular nomic structure is as constrained Hamiltonian theories within which ill-posedness of the equations of motion is connected to a pernicious form of surplus representational…

A brief obituary of Igal Talmi (1925-2026) focusing on his scientific heritage. Published in Nuclear Physics News 36 (2026) 39-40.

Quantum gravity suggests that spacetime may not be fundamental, and it has been argued that we can understand a theory without a fundamental spacetime if we are able to claim that spacetime `emerges' from some non-spatiotemporal entities.…

Naturalness is commonly presented as an objective constraint on physical theories: a model requiring fine-tuning is judged implausible. This presentation conflates a representation-dependent quantity with an invariant one. A fine-tuning…

The "cathetus rule" in optics alleges that the image of an object-point, formed by reflection or refraction at a surface, lies on the perpendicular ("cathetus") from the object-point to or through the surface. The first known statement of…

Several scholars have accorded the Tychonic System a prominent place, considering it a credible alternative to the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. In recent years, there have even been some enthusiastic contributions in support of Brahe,…

The notion of rigour relevant to the practice of physics is an endogenous one. Theoretical physics has its own internal norms about mathematical practice and notions of legitimate derivations or formal objects. These norms are often…

Newton's laws of motion pose an apparent problem, sometimes referred to as "the independence problem": the first law seems to be a simple consequence of the second law, raising the question of why it was included as a separate law. Numerous…

It is often said that time vanishes in quantum gravity. One general approach to quantum gravity accepts this fundamental timelessness but seeks to derive time's emergence at a non-fundamental level. To better assess such approaches, I…

Recent critiques of the semantic conception of scientific theories suggest that a theory is not best formulated as a collection of models satisfying some set of kinematical or dynamical conditions. Thus it has been argued that additional…

There have been three geometrizations in history. The first one is historically due to the Pythagorean school and Plato, the second one comes from Galileo, Kepler, Descartes and Newton, and the third geometrization of nature begins with…

The application of the notion of `observable' from gauge theory to diffeomorphism-invariant theories -- most relevantly to general relativity -- has led to numerous conceptual and technical issues when interpreting classical theories with…