物理学史与哲学

The emergence of Boris Struminsky's January, 1965 paper with a footnote that introduced a new quark quantum number now known as color caused a response [arXiv:0908.2772] that is seen, perhaps contrary to what it was intended to convey, to…

The recollection of souvenirs on great theoretical physicist, addressed to wide physical audience on the occasion of Bogoliubov centenary. Contains four parts: 1. Personal impressions; 2. Joint work; 3. Bogoliubov cp. Landau and 4.…

The idea that an internal quantum number for quarks, eventually called color, can explain the magnetic moments of baryons within the framework of standard quantum theory, was explicitly stated in a 7th January, 1965 JINR publication by…

Landauer erasure seems to provide a powerful link between thermodynamics and information processing (logical computation). The only logical operations that require a generation of heat are logically irreversible ones, with the minimum heat…

Leon Rosenfeld published in 1930 the first systematic Hamiltonian approach to Lagrangian models that possess a local gauge symmetry. The application of this formalism to theories with local internal symmetries, such as electromagnetism in…

The historical developments of conformal transformations and symmetries are sketched: Their origin from stereographic projections of the globe, their blossoming in two dimensions within the field of analytic complex functions, the generic…

Einstein considered general covariance to characterize the novelty of his General Theory of Relativity (GTR), but Kretschmann thought it merely a formal feature that any theory could have. The claim that GTR is "already parametrized"…

A personal account of work on the Manhattan Project in Chicago by one of the few remaining survivors of the war-time project is given, illustrating, among other things, how absurd things can happen at a time of great stress and concern.. As…

The sacred landscape of the Inka capital Cusco was conceived in accordance with a complex cosmographic view in which religion and astronomy were intimately connected. Some previously unnoticed possibilities in interpreting these connections…

The so-called Miccinelli documents are a set of documents which were written by Jesuit scholars in Peru within the first half of the 17th century. Among such documents, one contains the depiction of a Quipu, that is, a device made out of…

The architectural complexes composed by the two main pyramids of Giza together with their temples are investigated from an inter-disciplinary point of view, taking into account their astronomical alignments as well as their relationships…

Some aspects of the history and impact of the dimension revolution are briefly surveyed, starting with Nordstrom's D=5 scalar gravity-electromagnetism unification.

From the perspective of cultural studies and critical theory, Luhmann's communication-theoretical approach in sociology can still be read as a meta-biology: while biologists take the development of life as a given, Luhmann tends to treat…

A complete theoretical model describing artificial disintegration of nuclei by bombardment with alpha-particles, developed by Majorana as early as in 1930, is discussed in detail alongside the basic experimental evidences that motivated it.…

The question of annual stellar parallax is usually viewed as having been a "win-win situation" for seventeenth-century astronomers who subscribed to the Copernican view of universe in which the Earth orbits the Sun and the Sun is one of…

In the present study we attempt to incorporate the philosophical dialogue about physical reality into the instructional process of quantum mechanics. Taking into account that both scientific realism and constructivism represent, on the…

In Dantean cosmography the Universe is described as a series of concentric spheres with all the known planets embedded in their rotation motion, the Earth located at the centre and Lucifer at the centre of the Earth. Beyond these "celestial…

"I have dealt with many different transformations with various periods of time, but the quickest that I have met was my own transformation in one moment from a physicist to a chemist." Ernest Rutherford (Nobel Banquet, 1908) This article is…

The article traces the way Einstein formulated the relation between energy and mass in his work from 1905 to 1955. Einstein emphasized quite often that the mass $m$ of a body is equivalent to its rest energy $E_0$. At the same time he…

Roy P. Kerr has discovered his celebrated metric 45 years ago, yet the problem to find a generalization of the Schwarzschild metric for a rotating mass was faced much earlier. Lense and Thirring, Bach, Andress, Akeley, Lewis, van Stockum…