物理学史与哲学

Theoretical and experimental developments in the 1920s that accompanied the birth of coincidence methods, as well as later crucial applications during the 1930s and 1940s are presented. In 1924 Walther Bothe and Hans Geiger applied a…

Kepler's laws of planetary motion are acknowledged as highly significant to the construction of universal gravitation. The present study demonstrates different ways to derive the law of equal areas for the Earth by general geometrical and…

A paper of Thomas Young (1773-1829) on the behavior of streams of air makes a good starting point for discussing the not always fair, sometimes serendipitous, association of a physical phenomenon with its discoverer. In a didactic context,…

A review of Peter Byrne's biography of Hugh Everett III, "The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family", (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Cascades of charged particles are created when high-energy cosmic rays enter the earth's atmosphere: these 'extensive air-showers' are studied to gain information on the energy spectrum, arrival direction distribution and mass composition…

We would like to discuss, within the inherent historical context, upon one of the main works of fundamental physics which has led to the formulation of the early resonance dual models prior to string theory. In fact, we shall focus on…

Our laws of nature and our cosmos appear to be delicately fine-tuned for life to emerge, in a way that seems hard to attribute to chance. In view of this, some have taken the opportunity to revive the scholastic Argument from Design,…

This article contains reminiscences of the collaborative work that Richard Arnowitt and I did together which stretched over many years and encompasses several areas of particle theory. The article is an extended version of my talk at the…

We demonstrate the extraordinary modernity of the 1924/25 "Einstein-Jordan fluctuation conundrum", a Gedankenexperiment which led Jordan to his quantization of waves published as a separate section in the famous Born-Heisenberg-Jordan 1926…

Between 1900 and 1913 several people were investigating about the unknown radiation, later identified as Cosmic Rays. Several experimentalist tried to identify the origin of this radiation and in particular Victor Franz Hess, Theodor Wulf…

This short note describes the history of cosmic ray research. A part of this document was presented orally at the international conference of CRIS 2010 held in Catania, Italy. The document is written being based on the English translation…

As we approach the 125th anniversary of the Michelson-Morley experiment in 2012, we review experiments that test the isotropy of the speed of light. Previous measurements are categorized into one-way (single-trip) and two-way (round-trip…

Professor Chen Ning Yang has made seminal and influential contributions in many different areas in theoretical physics. This talk focuses on his contributions in statistical mechanics, a field in which Professor Yang has held a continual…

Almost half a century passed between the discovery of superconductivity by Kamerlingh Onnes and the theoretical explanation of the phenomenon by Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer. During the intervening years the brightest minds in theoretical…

Dirac's contributions to the discovery of non-relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics, prior to his discovery of the relativistic wave equation, are described.

As a material property and as a metaphor, thermal conductivity occupies an important position in physical, biological and geological sciences. Yet, its precise measurement is dependent on using electricity as a proxy because flowing heat…

Free fall has signed the greatest markings in the history of physics through the leaning Pisa tower, the Cambridge apple tree and the Einstein lift. The perspectives offered by the capture of stars by supermassive black holes are to be…

The dominance of string theory in the research landscape of quantum gravity physics (despite any direct experimental evidence) can, I think, be justified in a variety of ways. Here I focus on an argument from mathematical fertility, broadly…

We review the introduction in physics of the concepts of an elementary space length and of a fundamental time scale, analyzing some related unknown contributions by Ettore Majorana. In particular, we discuss the quasi-Coulombian scattering…

In several papers, John Norton has argued that Bayesianism cannot handle ignorance adequately due to its inability to distinguish between neutral and disconfirming evidence. He argued that this inability sows confusion in, e.g., anthropic…