物理学史与哲学
This paper deals with Nancy Cartwright's views on the measurement problem in Quantum Mechanics, as exposed in her book {\it{How the Laws of Physics Lie}}. She does not accept the logic of Quantum Mechanics. It is argued that her proposals,…
The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 was one of the most significant developments of science in the last half century. A simplified history has Peter Higgs positing it in the mid-1960s followed by a long wait while experimentalists…
In recent years, different scientific disciplines, from Physics to Egyptology, from Geology to Archaeoastronomy, evidenced a series of clues pointing to the possibility that the original project of the pyramid complex of Khufu at Giza…
The megalithic enclosures of Gobekli Tepe (Urfa, Turkey) are the most ancient sacred structures of stone known so far, dating back to the 10 millennium BC. The possible presence of astronomical targets for these structures is analysed, and…
Conceptual landscapes in Egypt show a remarkable continuity - for as long as 2000 years - in the use of symbols and in the interplay between natural and man-built features. Directionality, both in the sense of succession of elements and of…
The neutrino is the most elusive particle that we know and for many years physicists doubted that neutrinos might never be revealed. Today we know and we reveal neutrinos produced by different astrophysical objects and by interactions of…
It is widely accepted that the notion of an inertial frame is central to Newtonian mechanics and that the correct space-time structure underlying $\text{Newton's}$ methods in $\textit{Principia}$ is neo-Newtonian or Galilean space-time. I…
This is a systematic review of the concept of indistinguishability in both classical and quantum mechanics, with particular attention to Gibbs' paradox. Section 1 is on the Gibbs paradox; section 2 is a defense of the concept of classical…
Newton's potential of a massive homogeneous ellipsoid is derived via Dirichlet's discontinuous factor. At first we review part of Dirichlet's work in an English translation of the original German, and then continue with an extension of his…
The results of a careful analysis of all the available information on the activities of Heisenberg and of his talks during the years 1939 to 1945 can be summarized in the following way. Like several other German physicists Heisenberg was…
The paper presents a memoir of 1931 written by Vito Volterra on the Italian physicists of the nineteenth century and the researches these scientists made after the discoveries of Michael Faraday on electromagnetism. Here, the memoir…
Extracting predictions from cosmological theories that describe a multiverse, for what we are likely to observe in our domain, is crucial to establishing the validity of these theories. One way to extract such predictions is from…
The recent detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO/VIRGO team is an incredibly impressive achievement of experimental physics. It is also a tremendous success of the theory of General Relativity. It confirms the existence of black…
In 1923 Louis de Broglie (1892-1987) discovered the material waves and six years later received the Nobel price for this discovery. Apart these well known facts this French physicist nevertheless seems to be forgotten. Details of his life…
It is argued that properties of Democritus' atoms parallel those of volume forms in differential geometry. This kind of atoms has not "size" of finite magnitude. ----- Se arguye que las propiedades de los atomos de Democrito son paralelas a…
In the book "String Theory and the Scientific Method", Richard Dawid describes a few of the many non-empirical arguments that motivate theoretical physicists' confidence in a theory, taking string theory as case study. I argue that…
In the eighth century BC something peculiar seems to happen on Sicily. The archaeological record starts to show the arrival of Greek material culture. By the fifth century BC the island is effectively 'Hellenised' and ancient historians…
A novel recovery of some important documents related to the Fermi course on neutron physics, held at Los Alamos in 1945, is announced. Its relevance for the effective launch of a British nuclear programme in the early postwar period,…
The letter reminds the historical fact that the known "Lorenz gauge" (or "Lorenz condition/relation") is first mentioned in a written form and named after Ludwig Valentin Lorenz and not by/after Hendrik Antoon Lorentz.
Within the framework of modified Newtonian gravity it is shown that the corrected Newtonian scheme can't explain both Mercury's perihelion advance and the bending of light at the same time.