物理学史与哲学

This contribution tries to highlight the importance of Minkowski's ``Raum und Zeit'' lecture in a ``negative'' way, where {\it negative} is taken in the photographic sense of reversing lights and shades. Indeed, we focus on the ``shades''…

This purely recreational paper is about one of the most colorful characters of the Italian Renaissance, Girolamo Cardano, and the discovery of two basic ingredients of quantum theory, probability and complex numbers. The paper is dedicated…

We present and analyze in detail an unknown theory of ferromagnetism developed by Ettore Majorana as early as the beginnings of 1930s, substantially different in the methods employed from the well-known Heisenberg theory of 1928 (and from…

This is an English translation of Euler's article "Principia motus fluidorum" in which the Euler equation (in two three dimensions) has been established for the first time in 1752. The actual publication has been delayed by nine years.…

The first use of the stretched exponential function to describe the time evolution of a non-equilibrium quantity is usually credited to Rudolph Kohlrausch (1809-1858), who in 1854 applied it to the discharge of a capacitor. Attention is…

The original article of Rudolf Kohlrausch (1854) on stretched exponentials and their application to describe relaxation phenomena has been often misquoted in the literature after its rediscovery around 1984. We discuss here this fact and…

The zeroth theorem of the history of science (enunciated by E. P. Fischer) and widely known in the mathematics community as Arnol'd's Principle (decreed by M. V. Berry), states that a discovery (rule, regularity, insight) named after…

In this paper the Planck function is derived in the frequency domain using the method of oscillators. It is also presented in the wavelength domain and in the wave number domain. The latter is mainly used in spectroscopy for studying…

Einstein, in his "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Korper", gave a physical (operational) meaning to "time" of a remote event in describing "motion" by introducing the concept of "synchronous stationary clocks located at different places". But…

The historical background of the 19th century electromagnetic theory is revisited from the standpoint of the opposition between alternative approaches in respect to the problem of interactions. The 19th century electrodynamics became the…

The beliefs of physicists can bias their results towards their expectations in a number of ways. We survey a variety of historical cases of expectation bias in observations, experiments, and calculations.

When Enrico Fermi discovered slow neutrons, he accounted for their great efficiency in inducing radioactivity by merely mentioning the well-known scattering cross-section between neutrons and protons. He did not refer to capture…

The non-spherical shape of the Sun has been invoked to explain the anomalous precession of Mercury. A brief history of some methods for measuring solar diameter is presented. Archimedes was the first to give upper and lower values for solar…

95 years before Special Relativity was born, Arago attempted to detect the absolute motion of the Earth by measuring the deflection of starlight passing through a prism fixed to the Earth. The null result of this experiment gave rise to the…

We give an account of the appearance and first developments of the statistical model of atoms proposed by Thomas and Fermi, focusing on the main results achieved by Fermi and his group in Rome. Particular attention is addressed to the…

We argue that the starting point of Kaluza's idea of unifying electrodynamics and gravity was the analogy between gravitation and electromagnetism which was pointed out by Einstein and Thirring. It seems that Kaluza's attention was turned…

The pathways along which A. Einstein and D. Hilbert independently came to the gravitational field equations are traced. Some of the papers that assert a point of view on the history of the derivation of the gravitational field equations…

Coins of Armenian king Tigranes II the Great (95-55 BC), silver and copper-bronze tetradrachms and drachms, clearly reveal a star with a tail on the royal tiara which may be associated with the Halley's comet passage of 87 BC. If so, one…

After a quick historical account of the introduction of the group-theoretical description of Quantum Mechanics in terms of symmetries, as proposed by Weyl, we examine some unpublished papers by Ettore Majorana. Remarkable results achieved…

We investigate ``shell structure'' from Babylonian times: periodicities and beats in computer-simulated lunar data corresponding to those observed by Babylonian scribes some 2500 years ago. We discuss the mathematical similarity between the…