物理学史与哲学

In the Patent Office Einstein hatched his most beautiful ideas, and there he spent his "Happy Bern Years". These wonderful ideas led to his miraculous year works of 1905. Einstein was not an expert in academic matters, and he was out of…

This presentation goes beyond celebratory narration of the life and scientific achievements of Russia's first modern scientist Mikhail Vasilievich Lomonosov (1711-1765). Coming from the notion of complexity of sciences, we introduce "a…

A particular science is not only defined by its object of study, but also by the point of view and method under which it considers that same object. Taking space and time as an illustrative example, our main aim here is to bring out an…

Our main purpose here is to study some qualitative aspects of space and time. These include the notion of space and time regarded as the containers of respectively bodies and events, the divisibility of space, and the unrepeatability of…

There are two broad opposing classes of attitudes to reality (realist vs idealist, material vs mental) with corresponding attitudes to knowledge (objective vs subjective, scientific vs romantic). I argue that these attitudes can be…

There is a very reason to consider that to solve Zeno's paradoxes is to propose the theory of mechanical world view. We believe that this is not only our opinion but also most philosophers' opinion. Recently, in order to justify…

In 1905 Einstein presented the Clock Paradox and in 1911 Paul Langevin expanded Einstein's result to human observers, the "Twin Paradox." I will explain the crucial difference between Einstein and Langevin. Einstein did not present the…

T. H. Astbury (1858-1922) was for many years the much-respected headmaster of a boys' junior school in the English market town of Wallingford. By night he was a dedicated amateur astronomer who enjoyed observing meteors, variable stars and…

I present a formal ontological theory where the basic building blocks of the world can be either things or events. In any case, the result is a Parmenidean worldview where change is not a global property. What we understand by change…

The feeling of a moving present or `now' seems to form part of our most basic perceptions about reality. Such a present, however, is not reflected in any of our theories of the physical world. In this short note I argue for a tenseless view…

Five topics: A rigid body does not exist in the special theory of relativity; distant simultaneity defined with respect to a given frame of reference without any reference to synchronized clocks; challenges on Einstein's connection of…

We follow the trajectory of John H. Van Vleck from his 1926 Bulletin for the National Research Council (NRC) on the old quantum theory to his 1932 book, The Theory of Electric and Magnetic Susceptibilities. We highlight the continuity of…

Before 1905, Poincar\'e stressed the importance of the method of clocks and their synchronization, but unlike Einstein, magnet and conductor (asymmetries in Lorentz's theory regarding the explanation of Faraday's induction) or chasing a…

Einstein was the first to explore the inertial mass-energy equivalence. In 1905 Einstein showed that a change in energy is associated with a change in inertial mass equal to the change in energy divided by c2. In 1900 Poincar\'e considered…

John Goodricke and Edward Pigott, working in York, England, between 1781 and 1786, determined the periods of variation of eclipsing binaries such as Algol and Beta Lyrae and speculated that the eclipses of Algol might be caused by a "dark…

About twenty years ago, we proposed the mathematical formulation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and further, we concluded that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and EPR-paradox are not contradictory. This is true, however we now…

Writers read Einstein's letter to Mari\'c from 1901 in which he wrote: "bringing our work on relative motion to a successful conclusion!" What came afterwards was boosted by a claim that Joffe had seen the original relativity paper…

In 1895 Hendrik Antoon Lorentz derived the Fresnel dragging coefficient in his theory of immobile ether and electrons. This derivation did not explicitly involve electromagnetic theory at all. According to the 1922 Kyoto lecture notes,…

The intermediate stage of the development of general relativity is inseparable of Marcel Grossmann's mathematical assistance. Einstein acknowledges Grossmann's help during 1912-1914 to the development of general relativity. In fact, as with…

The Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli is commonly credited with performing the first precise experiments to determine the acceleration of a freely falling body. Riccioli has been discussed by historians of science, sometimes…