物理学史与哲学
On January 4, 2012, the centenary of Henri Poincar\'e's death, a colloquium was held in Nancy, France the subject of which was "Vers une biographie d'Henri Poincar\'e". Scholars discussed several approaches for writing a biography of…
This note will address the issue of the existence of God from a game theoretic perspective. We will show that, under certain assumptions, man cannot simultaneously be (i) rational and (ii) believe that an infinitely powerful God exists.…
The modern usage of the words astronomy and astrology is traced back to distinctions, largely ignored in recent scholarship. Three interpretations of celestial phenomena (in a geometric, a substantialist and a prognostic versions) coexisted…
Using as a springboard a three-way debate between theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright and myself, I address in layman's terms the issues of why we need a unified theory of the fundamental interactions…
Four hundred years after its publication, Galileo's masterpiece Sidereus Nuncius is still a mine of useful information for historians of science and astronomy. In his short book Galileo reports a large amount of data that, despite its age,…
I observe that, as the physics side of the OPERA-anomaly story is apparently unfolding, there can still be motivation for philosophy of science to analyze the six months of madness physicists spent chasing the dream of a new…
I begin by reviewing some recent work on the status of the geodesic principle in general relativity and the geometrized formulation of Newtonian gravitation. I then turn to the question of whether either of these theories might be said to…
The recognition that physical space (or space-time) is curved is a product of the general theory of relativity, such as dramatically shown by the 1919 solar eclipse measurements. However, the mathematical possibility of non-Euclidean…
We critically examine the evidence available of the early ideas on the bending of light due to a gravitational attraction, which led to the concept of gravitational lenses, and attempt to present an undistorted historical perspective.…
Ever since Werner Heisenberg's 1927 paper on uncertainty, there has been considerable hesitancy in simultaneously considering positions and momenta in quantum contexts, since these are incompatible observables. But this persistent…
Sundials and gnomons pointing out dates and times are a beautiful reminder of how we understand the movement of the Sun and use it to structure day and year. They also encapsulate the basic astronomical knowledge and concepts of the…
Recently, the page-proof, with corrections, of Einstein's 1920 publication on the "Propagation of Sound in Partly Dissociated Gases" was discovered in Leiden. The last two pages of the proof are crossed out and replaced by a sheet in…
The Finnish physicist Gunnar Nordstr\"om developed a competing theory of gravitation to Einstein's 1912-1913 gravitation theory. The equivalence principle was valid in his theory and it also satisfied red shift of the spectral lines from…
This paper deals with four topics: The first subject is Abraham's spherical electron, Lorentz's contracted electron and B\"ucherer's electron. The second topic is Einstein's 1905 relativity theory of the motion of an electron. Einstein…
Over the years many have written biographies of Einstein. They all based their biographies on primary sources, archival material: memories and letters of people who were in contact with Einstein, Einstein's own recollections; interviews…
In recent centuries the world has become increasingly dominated by empirical evidence and theoretic science in developing worldviews. Advances in science have dictated Roman Catholic doctrine such as the acceptance of Darwinian evolution…
The Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli is commonly credited with performing the first precise experiments to determine the acceleration of a freely falling body, but he also went further, experimentally investigating what today…
Childhood and Schooldays: Albert Einstein, and the family members seemed to have exaggerated the story of Albert who developed slowly, learned to talk late, and whose parents thought he was abnormal. These and other stories were adopted by…
Einstein at the Z\"urich Polytechnic: he skipped classes, did not attend all the lectures of his Professors, and before going to the examinations he studied instead from the notebooks of his good friend from class, Marcel Grossmann.…
In 1651 the Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli published within his Almagestum Novum, a massive 1500 page treatise on astronomy, a discussion of 126 arguments for and against the Copernican hypothesis (49 for, 77 against). A…