物理学史与哲学
Gerbert of Aurillac was Pope Sylvester II form 999 to 1003. His history is presented in order to understand his outstanding contribution in the establishment of quadrivium sciences (arithmetics, music, geometry and astronomy) in the…
The horologia are ancient ephemerides, tables of durations of the days and nights during all months of the year. The algorithms used to compute the horologia are here presented and the results are compared with the tables computed by…
In the 2 March 1979 issue of Science 203 S. J. Peale, P. Cassen and R. T. Reynolds published their paper "Melting of Io by tidal dissipation" indicating "the dissipation of tidal energy in Jupiter's moon Io is likely to have melted a major…
Physics has long lived with a schizophrenia that desires determinism for measured systems while demanding that experimenters decide what to measure on a whim. Intriguingly, such a free will assumption for experimenters has thwarted many…
Modern physics describes elementary particles by a formalism known as Quantum Field Theory. However, straight calculations with this formalism lead to numerous divergences, hence one needs a suitable regularization scheme. 40 years ago a…
The Chinese Pyramids are huge ancient burial mounds. In the satellite images we can see some complexes where the main buildings are the pyramidal mounds of an emperor and his empress. Here we discuss a possible sunrise/sunset orientation of…
Alexander the Great founded Alexandria in 331 BC. The newly founded town was conceived as an orthogonal grid based on a main longitudinal axis, later called Canopic Road. We analyse here the astronomical orientation of the project and…
We first see that the inertia of Newtonian mechanics is absolute and troublesome. General relativity can be viewed as Einstein's attempt to remedy, by making inertia relative, to matter---perhaps imperfectly though, as at least a couple of…
Gerbert of Aurillac wrote to Constantine of Fleury in 978 a letter to describe in detail the procedure to point the star nearest to the North celestial pole. This was made to align a sphere equipped with tubes to observe the celestial pole,…
Gerbert of Aurillac in the Mensura Fistularum explained how to compute the length of organ pipes. The method is shown on two octaves, starting from a fistula of length L=16 units and radius 1 which is equivalent at a monochord of length…
In this Note, which is a sequel on the Indian amateur astronomer R.G. Chandra [Biswas2011a, Biswas2011b], we have presented some documents to reveal his three-decades relationship with the American Association for Variable Stars Observers…
Wurdi Youang is an egg-shaped Aboriginal stone arrangement in Victoria, Australia. Here we present a new survey of the site, and show that its major axis is aligned within a few degrees of east-west. We confirm a previous hypothesis that it…
This note is by no means a comprehensive study of Minkowski's space-time formalism of special relativity. The mathematician, Hermann Minkowski was Einstein's former mathematics professor at the Z\"urich Polytechnic. During his studies at…
This paper has been withdrawn by the author. In this short paper I present a new approach to the problem of measurement, based on the difference between language (reality) and meta-language (meta-reality). This way, it will be shown as the…
In 1956 when I was a graduate student at the University of Rochester, the post doc Herman Winick arrived there, joined the group and we worked together with colleagues from different countries on low energy pion-proton elastic scattering at…
The basic problem posed by free will (FW) for physics appears to be not the \textit{physical} one of whether it is compatible with the laws of physics, but the \textit{logical} one of how to consistently define it, since it incorporates the…
Here a discussion on the Loulan Kingdom, an ancient kingdom along the Silk Road, and some observations based on satellite images.
This article presents twelve records of meteor showers in Arabic chronicles covering period from the 9th to the 19th century. The observations were in Egypt, Morocco, Syria and Yemen. These new addition historical records are considered to…
Quantum measurement predictions are consistent with relativity for macroscopic observations, but there is no consensus on how to explain this consistency in fundamental terms. The prevailing assumption is that the relativistic structure of…
It is widely believed that the advance of science in the Islamic world after the mid-fifteenth century A.D. suffered a decline. For the purpose of examining this belief, a manuscript by Qasim ali al-Qayini (ca. A.D.1685) was chosen based on…