物理学史与哲学

Although the extragalactic nature of quasars was discussed as early as 1960, it was rejected largely because of preconceived ideas about what appeared to be an unrealistically high radio and optical luminosity. Following the 1962…

A review is presented of the origin and development of the atomic hypothesis from antiquity till about the first millennium of the common era.

Aboriginal stories dating back many thousands of years talk of a fire from the sky in an area now home to the Henbury meteorite craters, in the Northern Territory

Are symmetries discovered or rather invented by humans ? The stand you may take firmly here reveals a lot of your epistemological position. Conversely, the arguments you may forge for answering to this question, or to one of its numerous…

In Book 8 of his Geographike Hyphegesis Ptolemy gives coordinates for ca. 360 so-called noteworthy cities. These coordinates are the time difference to Alexandria, the length of the longest day, and partly the ecliptic distance from the…

One of the most prominent feature of research in Russia and the former Soviet Union is so-called scientific schools. It is a collaboration of researchers with a common scientific background working, as a rule, together in a specific city or…

Here we have discussed on Fermi-Dirac statistics, in particular, on its brief historical progress, derivation, consequences, applications, etc. Importance of Fermi-Dirac statistics has been discussed even in connection with the current…

The correct interpretation of a fragment of Rheita about a sunspot observation in 1642 has crucial importance in estimating the amplitude of the solar cycle just before the Maunder Minimum. We show here that this record has been…

Descriptions of natural events, such as fireballs and meteorite impacts, are found within Indigenous Australian oral traditions. Studies of oral traditions demonstrate that they extend beyond the realm of myth and legend; they contain…

Some possible (re)sources of indeterminism and randomness encountered in physics are enumerated. These gaps in the physical laws, if they exist, could possibly be exploited for dualistic interfaces. We also speculate that physical laws and…

Niels Bohr's doctrine of the primacy of "classical concepts" is arguably his most criticized and misunderstood view. We present a new, careful historical analysis that makes clear that Bohr's doctrine was primarily an epistemological…

In this talk, I recall the history of the development of the unified electroweak theory, incorporating the symmetry-breaking Higgs mechanism, as I saw it from my standpoint as a member of Abdus Salam's group at Imperial College. I start by…

In 1907, Einstein suggested an experiment with flying atoms for corroborating time dilation. In that paper, the flying atom was conceived as a flying clock: the reference to the Doppler effect was only indirect (the experiments by Stark to…

Pioneering works and stimulation by S. Hayakawa for the development of high-energy astrophysics in Japan.

Evolutionary and Interpretive Archaeologies, edited by Ethan E. Cochrane and Andrew Gardner, grew out of a seminar at the Institute for Archaeology at University College London in 2007. It consists of 15 chapters by archaeologists who…

Since ancient times, mathematics has proven unreasonably effective in its description of physical phenomena. As humankind enters a period of advancement where the completion of the much coveted theory of quantum gravity is at hand, there is…

We propose an interpretation of the Newton's second law that is suggested by Galilean Relativity theory.

I put forward a simple unidimensional mechanical analogue of the three-dimensional universe models of modern relativistic cosmology. The main goal of the proposal is the appropriate appreciation of the intrinsic relationship between…

I try to recreate the scientific atmosphere during Wilson's visits to Moscow in '60-s and '70-s

It is widely known that Paul Ehrenfest formulated and applied his adiabatic hypothesis in the early 1910s. Niels Bohr, in his first attempt to construct a quantum theory in 1916, used it for fundamental purposes in a paper which eventually…