物理学史与哲学

The Clementine gnomon has been built in 1702 to measure the Earth's obliquity variation. For this reason the pinhole was located in the walls of Diocletian's times (305 a. D.) in order to remain stable along the centuries, but its original…

Gerbert of Aurillac was the most prominent personality of the tenth century: astronomer, organ builder and music theoretician, mathematician, philosopher, and finally pope with the name of Silvester II (999-1003). Gerbert introduced firstly…

"Symmetry" was one of the most important methodological themes in 20th-century physics and is probably going to play no lesser role in physics of the 21st century. As used today, there are a variety of interpretations of this term, which…

Here we argue that the notion of falsifiability, a key concept in defining a valid scientific theory, can be quantified using Bayesian Model Selection, which is a standard tool in modern statistics. This relates falsifiability to the…

After a brief introduction to the theoretical basis of the Higgs mechanism for generating the masses of elementary particles, the experimental searches for Higgs particles will be summarized, from bounds at LEP to inferences for LHC. The…

The fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life has received a great deal of attention in recent years, both in the philosophical and scientific literature. The claim is that in the space of possible physical laws, parameters and…

This is an account of Allan Sandage's work on (1) The character of the expansion field. For many years he has been the strongest defender of an expanding Universe. He later explained the CMB dipole by a local velocity of 220 +/- 50 km/s…

The cosmic ray conference at Bagn`eres de Bigorre in July, 1953 organized by Patrick Blackett and Louis Leprince-Ringuet was a seminal one. It marked the beginning of sub atomic physics and its shift from cosmic ray research to research at…

We review the non-trivial issue of the relativistic description of a quantum mechanical system that, contrary to a common belief, kept theoreticians busy from the end of 1920s to (at least) mid 1940s. Starting by the well-known works by…

Theories in physics usually do not address ``the present''or ``the now''. However, they usually have a precise notion of an ``instant'' (or state). I review how this notion appears in relational point mechanics and how it suffices to…

The Einstein-Rupp experiments have been unduly neglected in the history of quantum mechanics. While this is to be explained by the fact that Emil Rupp was later exposed as a fraud and had fabricated the results, it is not justified, due to…

The editors have dedicated this special issue on superconducting materials "to Ted Geballe in honor of his numerous seminal contributions to the field of superconducting materials over more than 60 years, on the year of his 95th birthday."…

A long time-series of sunspot observations is preserved from Samuel Heinrich Schwabe who made notes and drawings of sunspots from 1825-1867. Schwabe's observing records are preserved in the manuscript archives of the Royal Astronomical…

We review the work and life of Otto Stern who developed the molecular beam technique and with its aid laid the foundations of experimental atomic physics. Among the key results of his research are: the experimental determination of the…

It has already been empirically verified that for many Bronze Age monuments erected in Scotland between 1400-900 BC, there was a concerted effort on behalf of the builders to align their monuments to astronomical bodies on the horizon. It…

I articulate and discuss a geometrical interpretation of Yang-Mills theory. Analogies and disanalogies between Yang-Mills theory and general relativity are also considered.

In this paper I describe a simple numerical procedure to compute synthetic horizon altitude profiles for any given site. The method makes use of a simplified model of local Earth's curvature, and it is based on the availability of digital…

One of the greatest discoveries of modern times is that of the expanding Universe, almost invariably attributed to Hubble (1929). What is not widely known is that the original treatise by Lemaitre (1927) contained a rich fusion of both…

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the particle accelerator operating at CERN, is probably the most complex and ambitious scientific project ever accomplished by humanity. The sheer size of the enterprise, in terms of financial and human…

The status of the geodesic principle in General Relativity has been a topic of some interest in the recent literature on the foundations of spacetime theories. Part of this discussion has focused on the role that a certain energy condition…