物理学史与哲学

Maria Reiche devoted her life to the study of the Nazca Lines, the most famous Peruvian geoglyphs. In fact, she was an archaeoastronomer that proposed for the Lines some interesting astronomical interpretations. We can appraise her approach…

Whilst camped at Ooldea, South Australia, between 1919 and 1935, the amateur anthropologist Daisy Bates CBE (1859-1951) recorded the daily lives, lore, and oral traditions of the Aboriginal people of the Great Victoria Desert region…

What is known as "Hilbert's hotel" is a story of an imaginary hotel with infinitely many rooms that illustrates the bizarre consequences of assuming an actual infinity of objects or events. Since the 1970s it has been used in a variety of…

During the summer of 1837 Christian Ludwig Gerling, a former student of Carl Friedrich Gau{\ss}'s, organized the world wide first determination of the deflection of the vertical in longitude. From a mobile observatory at the Frauenberg near…

In recent literature, it has become clear that quantum physics does not refute Humeanism. This point has so far been made with respect to Bohms quantum theory. Against this background, this paper seeks to achieve the following four results:…

In 1917 Einstein initiated modern cosmology by postulating, based on general relativity, a homogeneous, static, spatially curved universe. To counteract gravitational contraction he introduced the cosmological constant. In 1922 Alexander…

The theoretical solid-state physicist Walter Kohn was awarded one-half of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his mid-1960's creation of an approach to the many-particle problem in quantum mechanics called density functional theory (DFT).…

The idea of a moving present or `now' seems to form part of our most basic beliefs about reality. Such a present, however, is not reflected in any of our theories of the physical world. I show in this article that presentism, the doctrine…

A look back at Kenneth Wilson's contributions to theoretical physics, with some reminiscences of the professor I encountered at Cornell during the 1980s.

We comment on a recent paper by Hobson, explaining that quantum "fields" are no more fields than quantum "particles" are particles, so that the replacement of a particle ontology by an all-field ontology cannot solve the typical…

Magnetic fields of cosmic bodies are generated by the hydromagnetic dynamo effect in moving electrically conducting fluids, such as liquid metals or plasmas. Once produced, cosmic magnetic fields are able to act back on moving fluids. This…

The history of weak interactions starting with Fermi's creation of the beta decay theory and culminating in its modern avatar in the form of the electroweak gauge theory is described. Discoveries of parity violation, matter-antimatter…

The 1950s-- and perhaps also the 1960s-- were very special times for the development of solid-state/condensed-matter physics. The University of Illinois at Urbana was at the center of these activities. In areas like NMR and…

Ya.B. Zeldovich was a pre-eminent Soviet physicist whose seminal contributions spanned many fields ranging from physical chemistry to nuclear and particle physics, and finally astrophysics and cosmology. March 8, 2014 marks Zeldovich's…

The relationship between the Bell article in 1964 and its well known inequalities with the Einstein Podolsky Rosen article in 1935 is revisited. Einstein views on quantum mechanics as stated in many circumstances up to his death in 1955 are…

This paper presents high-resolution images of the original document of the 24 February 1616 condemnation of the Copernican system, as being "foolish and absurd in philosophy", by a team of consultants for the Roman Inquisition. Secondary…

This paper presents a detailed study of the knowledge of the Kamilaroi and Euahlayi peoples about the Emu in the Sky. This study was done with ethnographic data that was not previously reported in detail. We surveyed the literature to find…

The Dutch Jesuit astronomer Johan Stein published in 1909 a text about the legend on a papal bull of Pope Callixtus III against the comet of 1456. This comet happened to be the Halley's one. The original documents, either chronicles and…

After G. N. Lewis (1875-1946) proposed the term "photon" in 1926, many physicists adopted it as a more apt name for Einstein's light quantum. However, Lewis' photon was a concept of a very different kind, something few physicists knew or…

This paper explores the issue of the unification of three languages of physics, the geometric language of forces, geometric language of fields or 4-dimensional space-time, and probabilistic language of quantum mechanics. On the one hand,…