物理学史与哲学

Yurii Fedorovich Smirnov (1935-2008) was a famous theoretical physicist. He achieved his career mainly at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of Moscow. These notes describe some particular facets of the contributions of the late Professor…

We examine the equant model for the motion of planets, which has been the starting point of Kepler's investigations before he modified it because of Mars observations. We show that, up to first order in eccentricity, this model implies for…

The traditional cultures of Aboriginal Australians include a significant astronomical component, which is usually reported in terms of songs or stories associated with stars and constellations. Here we argue that the astronomical components…

This article traces the birth and growth of solar physics at the Kodaikanal Observatory of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore, India. A major discovery took place here in 1909 by John Evershed who detected radial outflow of…

Eighty years after de Broglie's, and a little more than half a century after Bohm's seminal papers, the de Broglie--Bohm theory (a.k.a. Bohmian mechanics), which is presumably the simplest theory which explains the orthodox quantum…

The quantum logical and quantum information-theoretic traditions have exerted an especially powerful influence on Bub's thinking about the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics. This paper discusses both the quantum logical and…

The paper starts with the proposal that the cause of the apparent insolubility of the free-will problem are several popular but strongly metaphysical notions and hypotheses. To reduce the metaphysics, some ideas are borrowed from physics. A…

Em geral, quando a teoria fenomenol\'ogica de Ginzburg-Landau para supercondutores \'e trabalhada, pouco se esclarece aos alunos sobre a origem da mesma. Esta tem como base conceitos termodin\^amicos como fen\^omenos cr\'iticos e…

Using black-hole arguments with widely accepted premises, we show that it is extremely improbable that space is Euclidean, and that it is unspeakably improbable that space is hyperbolic. Independently, using an argument which makes no…

James Clerk Maxwell is known for his outstanding contributions to fundamental physics. These include providing the equations that govern electric and magnetic fields, establishing the basis of modern colourimetry, finding important…

During the last five years of his life, 1874-79, James Clerk Maxwell was absorbed in editing the electrical researches of Henry Cavendish, performed 100 years earlier. This endeavour is often assumed to be a work of duty to the Cavendish…

Szilard's one-molecule engine is operated by a Maxwell's demon attempting to convert heat to work. It is argued here that when using the demon to relate information to work (Landauer's principle), the demon's goal must be regarded as an…

Einstein's first mention of the uniformly rotating disk in print was in 1912, in his paper dealing with the static gravitational fields. After the 1912 paper, the rotating disk problem occurred in Einstein's writings only in a 1916 review…

This dissertation is about The history of quaternions and their associated rotation groups as it relates to theoretical physics.

Parts of Australia have been privileged to see dazzling lights in the night sky as the Aurora Australis (known as the southern lights) puts on a show this year. Aurorae are significant in Australian Indigenous astronomical traditions.…

Phillips and Hedges suggested, in the scientific magazine Nature (1989), that neutron radiation could be liable of a wrong radiocarbon dating, while proton radiation could be responsible of the Shroud body image formation. On the other…

The paper considers the "GR-desideratum", that is, the way general relativity implements general covariance, diffeomorphism invariance, and background independence. Two cases are discussed where $5$-dimensional generalizations of general…

Early ethnographers and missionaries recorded Aboriginal languages and oral traditions across Australia. Their general lack of astronomical training resulted in misidentifications, transcription errors, and omissions in these records.…

By c. 3000 BC, in the late Neolithic, there had been a significant change in the way people materialized their cosmology across Scotland with the introduction of free-standing stones. These were erected almost until the end of the Bronze…

I argue that the Oxford school Everett interpretation is internally incoherent, because we cannot claim that in an Everettian universe the kinds of reasoning we have used to arrive at our beliefs about quantum mechanics would lead us to…