物理学史与哲学
This paper presents an epistemological perspective on quantum communication between parties that highlights the choices that must be made in order to send and obtain information. The notion of information obtained in such a communication is…
Work of Lev Landau had a profound impact on the physics in 20th century. Landau had created the paradigms that had framed the conversations on the outstanding problems in physics for decades. He has laid the foundations for our…
From his observations of the A.D. 1572 super-nova and the A.D. 1577 comet, Tycho Brahe concluded that such transient celestial objects are outside the Earth's atmosphere, and he quoted the 9th century A.D. Persian astrologer and astronomer…
Dmitri Ivanenko, professor of Moscow State University, was one of the great theoreticians of XX century, an author of the proton-neutron model of atomic nucleus. In honor of the 110th Year Anniversary.
During his whole scientific life Hermann Weyl was fascinated by the interrelation of physical and mathematical theories. From the mid 1920s onward he reflected also on the typical difference between the two epistemic fields and tried to…
Speculations and theories about the existence of other worlds have a long history. In recent times, the arguments have shifted away from their typical philosophical and theological character to supposedly become more objective thanks to…
Professor Richard H. Dalitz passed away on January 13, 2006. He was almost 81 years old and his outstanding contributions are intimately connected to some of the major breakthroughs of the 20th century in particle and nuclear physics. These…
I argue that European schools of thought on memory and memorization were critical in enabling the growth of the scientific method. After giving a historical overview of the development of the memory arts from ancient Greece through 17th…
A number of elite thinkers in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries pursued an agenda which historian Paolo Rossi calls the "quest for a universal language," a quest which was deeply interwoven with the emergence of the scientific…
Response to William A. Wilson on the limits and fallibility of science.
Classical and quantum field theory provide not only realistic examples of extant notions of empirical equivalence, but also new notions of empirical equivalence, both modal and occurrent. A simple but modern gravitational case goes back to…
The modern picture of the neutrino as a multiple mass highly mixed neutral particle has emerged over 40 years of study. Best known of the issues leading to this picture was the apparent loss of neutrinos coming from the sun. This article…
This article is meant to formulate the equations of motion of an electron in a cavity magnetron using action-angle variables. This means following the electron's path on its way from a cylindrical cathode moving toward a co-axial…
The discovery of spontaneous symmetry breaking in particle physics was the greatest contribution in Nambu's achievements. There is another class of symmetries that exist in the low energy nature, yet is doomed to be broken at high energy,…
This paper is based on a talk delivered on 16 November, 2015 in Osaka at the Nambu's Century: International Symposium on Yoichiro Nambu's Physics
We discuss some current problems in the relationship between elementary particle physics and gravitation, i.e., in the subject investigated by Prof.~K.~P.~Staniukovich half a century ago. Specifically, the inflationary stage of the Universe…
In this paper, we discuss some of the consequences of the CGPM (1983) definition of meter and, in particular, we discuss giving the speed of light an exact value. It is shown that this act touches the fundamental paradigms, such as the…
We discuss scientific realism from the perspective of modern cosmology, especially primordial cosmology: i.e. the cosmological investigation of the very early universe. We first (Section 2) state our allegiance to scientific realism, and…
A talk presented at the April 2016 APS meeting in Salt Lake City: The speaker had the great good fortune to take an undergraduate course in group theory from Sidney Coleman, and (after graduate school away) was hired by Coleman to a…
Recent work on the history of General Relativity by Renn, Sauer, Janssen et al. shows that Einstein found his field equations partly by a physical strategy including the Newtonian limit, the electromagnetic analogy, and energy conservation.…