物理学史与哲学

In his Chronology, Newton uses astronomical "evidence" to support its extreme rejuvenation of ancient times. These elements, having a scientific varnish, provide some credibility to the work. They have been fiercely debated for a century,…

This article reviews the early academic and public reception of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in the Netherlands, particularly after Arthur Eddington's eclipse experiments of 1919. Initially, not much attention was given to…

The superposition principle forms the very backbone of quantum theory. The resulting linear structure of quantum theory is structurally so rigid that tampering with it may have serious, seemingly unphysical, consequences. This principle has…

This article discusses new material, published in Volume 12 of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, that addresses Einstein's knowledge of the Michelson-Morley experiment prior to 1905: in a lecture in Chicago in 1921, Einstein referred…

The history of renormalization is reviewed with a critical eye, starting with Lorentz's theory of radiation damping, through perturbative QED with Dyson, Gell-Mann & Low, and others, to Wilson's formulation and Polchinski's functional…

Ptolemy's model of the Moon's motion implied that its distance varies by nearly a factor of two, implying that its angular size should also vary by nearly a factor of two. We present an analysis of 100 naked eye observations of the Moon's…

Experimental tests on `time dilation' began in 1938 with Ives and Stilwell's work of the transverse Doppler effect due to atoms in inertial flight. Rossi and Hall (1941) inaugurated the era of fast moving elementary particles that dominated…

The idea of atoms is old but X-rays provided the first probe into the physical atom. Photographs of X-ray scattering from crystals -Laue spots- were the first visual proof for the physical existence of atoms arranged in a perfect geometric…

This paper is dedicated to the research of secrets of Easter Island (Rapa Nui), a remote plot of land in the Pacific; the work includes not only necessary ethnological data, but also some results on the archaeoastronomy. The analysis of…

The Kamilaroi people and their neighbours, the Euahlayi, Ngemba, and Murrawarri, are an Aboriginal cultural grouping located in the northwest and north central of New South Wales. They have a rich history, but have been missed in much of…

Two people may claim both to be naturalists, but have divergent conceptions of basic elements of the natural world which lead them to mean different things when they talk about laws of nature, or states, or the role of mathematics in…

James Lee Fergason (1934 - 2008) focused his research on the liquid crystals. His studies correspond to a relevant part of the history of soft matter science and technology of liquid crystals. Here a discussion of some of his researches.

This manuscript presents a problem on special relativity theory (SRT) which embodies an apparent paradox relying on the concept of simultaneity. The problem is represented in the framework of Greek epic poetry and structured in a didactic…

In his first November 4, 1915 paper Einstein wrote the Lagrangian form of his field equations. In the fourth November 25, 1915 paper, Einstein added a trace term of the energy-momentum tensor on the right-hand side of the generally…

Astronomy arises very early in a civilization and evolves as the civilization advances. It is therefore reasonable to assume that a vibrant knowledge of astronomy would have been a feature of a civilization the size of the Harappan…

This note celebrates the centenary of Jagadis Chandra Bose's classic monograph entitled "Researches on irritability of plants".

The main purpose of the present paper is to show that a correction of one mistake was crucial for Einstein's pathway to the first version of the 1915 general theory of relativity, but also might have played a role in obtaining the final…

Why do gases reach equilibrium when left to themselves? The canonical answer, originally proffered by Boltzmann, is that the systems have to be ergodic. This answer is now widely regarded as flawed. We argue that some of the main…

A popular view in contemporary Boltzmannian statistical mechanics is to interpret the measures as typicality measures. In measure-theoretic dynamical systems theory measures can similarly be interpreted as typicality measures. However, a…

In 1956/1970 Gamow wrote that much later, when he was discussing cosmological problems with Einstein, he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the "biggest blunder" he ever made in his life. But the cosmological…