物理学史与哲学

A short autobiography written for a centennial party.

There is a good cause to assert that the Easter Islanders constantly watched Aldebaran and the Pleiades in the past. The Russian scholar Irina K. Fedorova and the American scholar Georgia Lee were the first who contributed significantly to…

Planck's introduction of the quantum of action in 1900 was followed by 25 years of trial and error in quest of the understanding of the quantum world; different ideas and directions had to be pursued until the path leading to the elementary…

Watchings of Canopus as a herald of the winter were important duties of ancient priests-astronomers on Easter Island. All the analysed data witness that this star was observed during the first and second voyages from Mangareva to the…

Path integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) simulations have become an important tool for the investigation of the statistical mechanics of quantum systems. I discuss some of the history of applying the Monte Carlo method to non-relativistic quantum…

This is a philosophical paper. It claims that there is a gap to be filled in the relationship between complexity theory (CT) and quantum theory (QT). This gap concerns two very distinct understandings of time. The paper provides the ground…

Why does the Sun shine? Today we know the answer to the question and we also know that earlier answers were quite wrong. The problem of the source of solar energy became an important part of physics and astronomy only with the emergence of…

Leo Kadanoff has worked in many fields of statistical mechanics. His contributions had an enormous impact. This holds in particular for critical phenomena, where he explained Widom's homogeneity laws by means of block-spin transformations…

The story-line of the activities that have produced the first group of scientists in Mexico working on particle accelerator science and technology is briefly presented.

These remarks open the one-day session "50 years of Hagedorn's Temperature and the Statistical Bootstrap Model". These developments set the path at CERN towards the discovery of Quark-Gluon Plasma in the year 2000.

History of Quark Matter '84 is presented

In a recent manuscript published in the Arxives (arXiv:1610.03049v1), it is claimed that it should be more appropriate to refer to the equation of hydrostatic equilibrium in a static spherically symmetric spacetime, supported by an…

The paper is proposing a possible link between the construction of the Silbury Hill, the prehistoric artificial mound near Avebury, and the observation of Alpha Crucis, the main star of the Crux constellation, which was slowly disappearing…

In a paper appearing in Annalen der Physik in 1930 Leon Rosenfeld invented the first procedure for producing Hamiltonian constraints. He displayed and correctly distinguished the vanishing Hamiltonian generator of time evolution, and the…

We present a reconstruction of the studies on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (FQM) carried out in Italy at the turn of the 1960s. Actually, they preceded the revival of the interest of the American physicists towards the FQM around…

The discovery of cosmic rays, a milestone in science, was based on the work by scientists in Europe and the New World and took place during a period characterised by nationalism and lack of communication. Many scientists that took part in…

The historical significance of the problem of relativistic rigid rotation is reviewed in light of recently published correspondence between Einstein and the mathematician Vladimir Varicak from the years 1909 to 1913.

This Introduction opens the book {\sl Standing Together in Troubled Times} which presents a story of friendship between Wolfgang Pauli, one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the 20th century, and Charlotte Houtermans. They met at…

Notions like meaning, signal, intentionality, are difficult to relate to a physical word. I study a purely physical definition of "meaningful information", from which these notions can be derived. It is inspired by a model recently…

If the concepts underlying Effective Theory were appreciated from the earliest days of Newtonian gravity, Le Verrier's announcement in 1845 of the anomalous perihelion precession of Mercury would have been no surprise. Furthermore, the size…