物理学史与哲学

The bird-man cult remains the main secret of Easter Island (Rapa Nui), a remote plot of land in the Pacific. This paper includes not only necessary ethnological data, but also some results on the archaeoastronomy. The research of some lines…

It is with great sadness that I report the passing of Dr Dianne Johnson in May 2012. Dr Johnson was a pivotal and important figure in the field of Australian cultural astronomy and in the campaign for Aboriginal rights.

Time is one of those issues about which many thinkers and scientists have tried to pronounce their finest thoughts, but the discourse about time has remained vague and often inconsistent. In this paper we put forward a conceptual framework…

Novae and supernovae are rare astronomical events that would have had an influence on the sky-watching peoples who witnessed them. Although several bright novae/supernovae have been visible during recorded human history, there are many…

Subject of our present paper is the analysis of the origins or historical roots of the Higgs boson research from a bibliometric perspective, using a segmented regression analysis in a reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS). Our…

As time advances in our perceived real world, existing information is preserved and new information is added to history. All the information that may ever be encoded in history must be about some fundamental, unique, atemporal and…

In this work, Einstein's view of geometry as physical geometry is taken into account in the analysis of diverse issues related to the notions of inertial motion and inertial reference frame. Einstein's physical geometry enables a…

This paper is a short introduction to a special issue on philosophy of cosmology, published in the May 2014 issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. I briefly introduce the philosophy of cosmology, and then provide a…

The concept of mechanical work is inherited from the concepts of potentia absoluta and men's work, both implemented in the Section IX of Daniel Bernoulli's Hydrodynamica in 1738. Nonetheless, Bernoulli did not confuse those two entities: he…

The explanation of the first-order Stark effect in hydrogen by Epstein and Schwarzschild in 1916 was seen as a great success for the old quantum theory. Yet, it also revealed some serious limitations of the theory. To recover the…

The old quantum theory and Schr\"odinger's wave mechanics (and other forms of quantum mechanics) give the same results for the line splittings in the first-order Stark effect in hydrogen, the leading terms in the splitting of the spectral…

This article reviews the biography of the Swiss mathematician Marcel Grossmann (1878-1936) and his contributions to the emergence of the general theory of relativity. The first part is his biography, while the second part reviews his…

According to the no-signaling theorem, the nonlocal collapse of the wavefunction of an entangled particle by the measurement on its twin particle at a remote location cannot be used to send useful information. Given that experiments on…

A personal view on Julius Wess's human and scientific legacy in Serbia and the Balkan region is given. Motivation for using noncommutative and nonarchimedean geometry on very short distances is presented. In addition to some mathematical…

What do we do when cosmology raises questions it cannot answer? These include the existence of a multiverse and the universality of the laws of physics. We cannot settle any of these issues by experiment, and this is where philosophers…

The ability of trees to suck water from roots to leaves, sometimes to heights of over a hundred meters, is remarkable given the absence of any mechanical pump. This study deals with a number of issues, of both an historical and conceptual…

Category theory has become central to certain aspects of theoretical physics. Bain [Synthese, 190:1621--1635 (2013)] has recently argued that this has significance for ontic structural realism. We argue against this claim. In so doing, we…

What are the historical evidence concerning the turning of the spyglass into an astronomical instrument, the telescope? In Sidereus Nuncius and in his private correspondence Galileo tells the reader what he did with the telescope, but he…

We discuss the songlines and navigation of the Wardaman people, and place them in context by comparing them with corresponding practices in other Australian Aboriginal language groups, using previously unpublished information and also…

In his scientific treatise entitled De Lineis, Angulis et Figuris, seu Fractionibus et Reflexionibus Radiorum, Robert Grosseteste is discussing some qualitative geometric rules about reflection and refraction. However, he is also discussing…