物理学史与哲学

Cornelis Easton (1864-1929) became a journalist and newspaper editor. During most of his career he was active as an amateur astronomer and contributed important papers in international astronomical journals This concerned three areas. The…

General Relativity (GR) was created in November 1915 and since its creation and up to now this theory has undergone many tests. The first realistic cosmological models were proposed in the works of Friedman, written in the 1920s. For a long…

We propose a formal reconstruction of quantum mechanics grounded not in external mathematical abstractions, but in the structured dynamics of subjective experience. The Qualia Abstraction Language (QAL) models physical systems as evolving…

Recent developments in foundations of physics have given rise to a class of views suggesting that physically meaningful descriptions must always be relativized to a physical perspective. In this article I distinguish between strong physical…

Newtons Laws of Motion form the basis of classical mechanics, but misconceptions about their interrelationships persist in pedagogy. A prevalent misunderstanding is that Newtons First Law is a trivial consequence of the Second Law. This…

This monograph discusses dualities in physics: what dualities are, their main examples--from quantum mechanics and electrodynamics to statistical mechanics, quantum field theory and string theory--and the philosophical questions they raise.…

The Schwarzschild solution was the first exact solution to Einstein's 1915 field equations, found by Karl Schwarzschild as early as 1916. And yet, physicists, mathematicians and philosophers have struggled for decades with the…

This paper introduces the physics and philosophy of strange metals, which are characterized by unusual electrical and thermal properties that deviate from conventional metallic behaviour. The anomalous strange-metal behaviour discussed here…

The Mulhouse mathematician Jean-Henri (or Johann Heinrich) Lambert (August 26 or 28, 1728; September 25, 1777) is well known for having devised the conformal conic projection in 1772, which is still used in some graphical outputs of our…

Scientific realism is the philosophical stance that science tracks truth, in particular in its depiction of the world's ontology. Ontologically, this involves a commitment to the existence of entities posited by our best scientific…

In this article, I argue that modern spacetime physics causes problems for a number of traditional accounts of modality, but also offers important new ideas about the connection between modal and non-modal features of reality. I suggest…

Motivated by a generalization of Hempel's dilemma, I introduce a novel notion of empirical structure, as well as theory supervenience as a new reductive relationship between theories. One theory supervenes on another theory if the empirical…

On October 22, 1934, in a famous experiment, Enrico Fermi and his colleagues discovered that a significant increase in induced radioactivity can be obtained when neutrons are slowed down by means of hydrogen atoms. This discovery and its…

I review the works of G\"ardenfors (1990) and Scorzato (2013) and show that their combination provides an elegant solution of Goodman's new riddle of induction. The solution is based on two main ideas: (1) clarifying what is expected from a…

This paper presents correspondence between Albert Einstein and the mathematical analyst J. L. B. Cooper on the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox of quantum theory published in 1935. Two letters written by Cooper, and the replies from…

In the 1960s and 1970s a series of observations and theoretical developments highlighted the presence of several anomalies which could, in principle, be explained by postulating one of the following two working hypotheses: (i) the existence…

The Tolman effect is well-known in relativistic cosmology but rarely discussed outside it. That is surprising because the effect -- that systems extended over a varying gravitational potential exhibit temperature gradients while in thermal…

Inertia has long been treated as the paradigm of natural motion. This paper challenges this identification through the lens of General Relativity. Drawing on Norton (2012)'s distinction between idealisation and approximation and analysing…

We establish that de Broglie's wave, as it is introduced in his Thesis, is not a wave on a given space, but on the contrary itself determines a system in which Special Relativity is locally valid. This local system is a physical object,…

Scientific realism is, currently, one of the most well-entrenched background assumptions of some relevant versions of anti-exceptionalism about logic. We argue that this is a sort of sociological contingency rather than a metaphilosophical…