物理学史与哲学

Cosmology as an exact physical science is of new date, but it has long roots in the past. This essay is concerned with four important themes in the history of cosmological thought which, if taken together, offer a fairly comprehensive…

South America is a region which is free from nuclear weapons. However, this was not an inevitable development from the relationships among its countries. Indeed, regional rivalries between Brazil and Argentina, with military implications…

With reference to primary sources it is shown that key claims made regarding the history of the pilot wave theory in Quantum Theory at the Crossroads are not supported by the historical record. It is also argued that the association of de…

Of the hundreds of distinct Aboriginal cultures of Australia, many have oral traditions rich in descriptions and explanations of comets, meteors, meteorites, airbursts, impact events, and impact craters. These views generally attribute…

Given that the cause for the strong increase in 14C in AD 774/5 in Japanese and German trees is still a matter of debate (e.g. short Gamma-Ray Burst or solar super-flare), we have searched in Arabic chronicles for reports about unusual…

The strong 14C increase in the year AD 774/5 detected in one German and two Japanese trees was recently suggested to have been caused by an impact of a comet onto Earth and a deposition of large amounts of 14C into the atmosphere (Liu et…

A geometric diagram that allows one to visualize the Poincar\'e formula for relativistic addition of velocities in one dimension is presented. An analogous diagram representing the angle sum formula for trigonometric tangent is given.

Einstein's theoretical analysis of mass-energy equivalence, already, at the time, experimentally evident in radioactive decays, in two papers published in 1905, as well as Planck's introduction, in 1906, of the concepts of relativistic…

Even if not so ancient, the history of the heat engine efficiency at maximum power expression have been yet turbulent. More than a decade after the publication of the seminal article by Curzon and Ahlborn in 1975, one's rediscovered two…

Ken Wilson's ideas on the renormalization group were shaped by his attempts to build a theory of the strong interactions based on the concepts of quantum field theory. I describe the development of his ideas by reviewing four of Wilson's…

This invited memoire describes my fortunate life, which has been enriched by meeting many wonderful people. The story starts at home and university, and continues with accounts of St Andrews and trips to the USA, together with musings on…

We comment on cases in the history of Astronomy, which may shed some light on the current established but enigmatic concordance model of Cosmology. Should the model be understood by adding new entities such as Dark Matter and Dark Energy,…

Recently much attention has been paid to the discovery of Hubble's law: the linear relation between the rate of recession of the distant galaxies and distance to them. Though we now mention several names associated with this law instead of…

In 1963-71, a group of people, myself included, formulated and perfected a new approach to physics problems, which eventually came to be known under the names of scaling, universality, and renormalization. This work formed the basis of a…

This note is based upon a talk given at a celebration in Austin Texas of the achievements of J. Willard Gibbs. J. Willard Gibbs, the younger, was the first American physical sciences theorist. He was one of the inventors of statistical…

In his treatise on light, written in about 1225, Robert Grosseteste describes a cosmological model in which the Universe is created in a big-bang like explosion and subsequent condensation. He postulates that the fundamental coupling of…

In extracting predictions from theories that describe a multiverse, we face the difficulty that we must assess probability distributions over possible observations, prescribed not just by an underlying theory, but by a theory together with…

The notion that we live in an evolving universe was established only in the twentieth century with the discovery of the recession of galaxies by Hubble and with the Lemaitre and Friedmann's interpretation in the 1920s. However, the concept…

A great astronomer, George Herbig, passed away in Honolulu on October 12, 2013, at the age of 93. His life and career were long and productive, and consistently dedicated to the careful, thorough research that earned him his reputation.…

A personal and subjective recollection, concerning mainly Wilson's lectures delivered over the spring of 1972 at Princeton University (summary of a talk at Cornell University on November 16, 2013 at the occasion of the memorial Kenneth G.…