物理学史与哲学

In the present paper I argue that the formalism of Newtonian mechanics stems directly from the general principle to be called the principle of microlevel reducibility which physical systems obey in the realm of classical physics. This…

It is well known that Niels Bohr insisted on the necessity of classical concepts in the account of quantum phenomena. But there is little consensus concerning his reasons, and what he exactly meant by this. In this paper, I re-examine…

The spectacular successes of quantum physics have made it a commonplace to assert that we live in a quantum world. This idea seems to imply a kind of "quantum fundamentalism" according to which everything in the universe (if not the…

This is a translation of a classic paper in German showing that the apparent power in an AC arc is larger than the active power although no phase shift exists between the voltage and the current, indicating that the reactive power vanishes.…

The concept of emergence is critically analyzed in particular with respect to the assumed emergence of mental properties from a neuronal basis. We argue that so-called contextual emergence is needed to avoid an eliminatory reductionism.…

In this article Denis Diderot's Fifth Memoir of 1748 on the problem of a pendulum damped by air resistance is discussed. Diderot wrote the Memoir in order to clarify an assumption Newton made without further justification in the first pages…

The research in quantum gravity has jauntily grown in the recent years, intersecting with conceptual and philosophical issues that have a long history. In this paper I analyze the conceptual basis on which Loop Quantum Gravity has grown,…

Historically, there have been many attempts to produce an appropriate mathematical formalism for modeling the nature of physical space, such as Euclid's geometry, Descartes' system of Cartesian coordinates, the Argand plane, Hamilton's…

The paper presents a metaphysical characterization of spatiotemporal backgrounds from a realist perspective. The conceptual analysis is based on a heuristic sketch that encompasses the common formal traits of the major spacetime theories,…

In the form of a dialogue (imitating in style Lakatos's Proof and Refutation), this chapter presents and explains the main points of the approach to contextuality dubbed Contextuality-by-Default.

Around 1936, Einstein wrote to his close friend Max Born telling him that, together with Nathan Rosen, he had arrived at the interesting result that gravitational waves did not exist, though they had been assumed a certainty to the first…

The first three sections of this article contain a broad brush summary of the profound changes in the notion of time in fundamental physics that were brought about by three revolutions: the foundations of mechanics distilled by Newton in…

In his 1916 ground-breaking general relativity paper Einstein had imposed a restrictive coordinate condition, his field equations were valid for coordinate systems which are unimodular. Later, Einstein published a paper on gravitational…

The application of photography to astronomy was a critical step in the development of astrophysics at the end of the nineteenth century. Using custom-built photographic telescopes and objective prisms, astronomers took images of the sky on…

The paper presents a program to construct a non-relativistic relational Bohmian theory, that is, a theory of $N$ moving point-like particles that dispenses with space and time as fundamental background structures. The relational program…

It is demonstrated that the reason for the diversity of interpretations of quantum mechanics is that they are not connected by continuity relations with classical physics, and also the reason is the impossibility of operationalist…

In February 1700, Isaac Newton needed a precise tropical year to design a new universal calendar that would supersede the Gregorian one. However, 17th-Century astronomers were uncertain of the long-term variation in the inclination of the…

The Swiss Federal Observatory, which had been founded in 1863 by Rudolf Wolf, was dissolved in connection with the retirement of Max Waldmeier in 1979. The determination of the Zurich sunpot number, which had been a cornerstone activity of…

Historians of science are generally unaware of the contributions of India to physics. The main reason for this is that very little research has been done on the subject in the recent past, a consequence of the fact that there are few…

I review some recent work on applications of category theory to questions concerning theoretical structure and theoretical equivalence of classical field theories, including Newtonian gravitation, general relativity, and Yang-Mills…