物理学史与哲学
The year 2012 will be the fourth centennial year of the Jesuit Christopher Clavius (1535-1612), known as the Euclid of XVI century and the collaborator of the Pope Gregory XIII for the calendar reformation. In the occasion of the year of…
A new Italian edition of the Letters of Gerbert, the astronomer, scientist and philosopher who become pope Silvester II, with their papal privileges has been published in the occasion of the international year of astronomy. The italian…
A theorem due to Bob Geroch and Pong Soo Jang ["Motion of a Body in General Relativity." Journal of Mathematical Physics 16(1), (1975)] provides a sense in which the geodesic principle has the status of a theorem in General Relativity (GR).…
The 1927 discovery of the expansion of the Universe by Lemaitre was published in French in a low-impact journal. In the 1931 high-impact English translation of this article a critical equation was changed by omitting reference to what is…
Is the universe digital or analog? In this essay I argue that both classical and quantum physics include limits that prevent us from definitively answering that question. That quantum physics does so is no surprise. That classical physics…
This is one of two papers about emergence, reduction and supervenience. It expounds these notions and analyses the general relations between them. The companion paper analyses the situation in physics, especially limiting relations between…
This is a companion to another paper. Together they rebut two widespread philosophical doctrines about emergence. The first, and main, doctrine is that emergence is incompatible with reduction. The second is that emergence is supervenience;…
Pascual Jordan's path-breaking role as the protagonist of quantum field theory (QFT) is recalled and his friendly dispute with Dirac's particle-based relativistic quantum theory is presented as the start of the field-particle conundrum…
During the conference on the methods of differential geometry in physics in Warsaw in June 1976, Professor Wheeler gave an interview for the Czechoslovak Journal of Physics A. After Professor Wheeler authorized the English version in…
Although the differential calculus was invented by Newton, Kepler established his famous laws 70 years earlier by using the same idea, namely to find a path in a nonuniform field of force by small steps. It is generally not known that…
We explore 50 Australian Aboriginal accounts of lunar and solar eclipses to determine how Aboriginal groups understood this phenomenon. We summarise the literature on Aboriginal references to eclipses, showing that many Aboriginal groups…
Felix de Roy (1883-1942), an internationality recognised amateur astronomer, made significant contributions to variable star research. As an active observer, he made some 91,000 visual estimates of a number of different variable stars. A…
The recognition of the agency of the knower has enormously enriched our understanding of knowledge production. There is a growing realization that what we know about how we know affects our interpretation of reality. This realization…
In this short Note we would like to bring into the attention of people working in General Relativity a Schwarzschild like metric found by Professor Cleopatra Mociu\c{t}chi in sixties. It was obtained by the A. Sommerfeld reasoning from his…
I contemplate the idea that the subjective world and quantum state reductions are one and the same. If true, this resolves with one stroke both the quantum mechanical measurement problem and the hard problem of consciousness.
Despite provable unknowables in recursion theory, indeterminism and randomness in physics is confined to conventions, subjective beliefs and preliminary evidence. The history of the issue is very briefly reviewed, and answers to five…
Translation of 'Die Logik Nicht Gleichzeitig Entscheidbarer Aussagen' by Ernst Specker, Dialectica, vol. 14, 239 - 246 (1960).
It is known since the 19 century that in the layout of the pyramid field of the pharaohs of the 4 th Egyptian dynasty at Giza, a main axis exists. Indeed, the south-east corners of these monuments align towards the site of the temple of…
William Maximilian Lindley, MC, MA, FRAS, AMICE (1891-1972) served as fifth Director of the BAA Variable Star Section from 1939 to 1958. He was an active variable star observer for many years and he wrote numerous publications on the…
In the present Note we have presented some documents to reveal the longstanding relationship of Indian amateur astronomer R. G. Chandra with British Astronomical Association.