物理学史与哲学

There is often a bond between two great men of a society at the time when one is at the peak of his life and the other at its beginning. The great Serbian 19th century poet, clergyman and educator father Vasa Zivkovic, interceding in favour…

Astrophysical paradoxes are the paradoxes of physics. The main motivation of a formulated paradox is clearly recognized in the scientific environment because the phenomenon of a paradox itself has become interesting. There is an explanation…

The aim of this work is to provide a possible philosophical motivation to the variational principles of physics in general and a possible way to unify the axiomatizations of mechanics theories. The leitmotif of this work is a dialectical…

The passage of particles through matter is one of the principal ways to investigate nature. In this article, we would like to outline the most important stages in the development of the theory about the stopping power.

String theory is at the moment the only advanced approach to a unification of all interactions, including gravity. But, in spite of the more than thirty years of its existence, it does not make any empirically testable predictions, and it…

Julian Schwinger's influence on twentieth century science is profound and pervasive. Of course, he is most famous for his renormalization theory of quantum electrodynamics, for which he shared the Nobel Prize with Richard Feynman and…

We give an accurate historical and scientific account of a previously unknown manuscript written by Ettore Majorana in French. The retrieved text deals with Quantum Electrodynamics by using the formalism of field quantization, and it is…

Currently, string theory represents the only advanced approach to a unification of all interactions, including gravity. In spite of the more than thirty years of its existence it did not make any empirically testable predictions. And it is…

We report on theoretical courses by Fermi and Majorana, giving evidence of the first appearance and further development of Quantum Mechanics teaching in Italy. On the basis of original documents, we make a comparison between Fermi's and…

In this minireview a historical excursus in theoretical studies related to the Glauber diffraction theory has been presented with an accent on the recent developments in this subject.

We analyze in some detail the course of Theoretical Physics held by Ettore Majorana at the University of Naples in 1938, just before his mysterious disappearance. In particular we present the recently discovered "Moreno Paper", where all…

In 1943 fear that the German war machine might use atomic bombs was abating and among physicists another fear was taking its place - that of a postwar nuclear arms race with worldwide proliferation of nuclear weapons. Manhattan Project…

The possibility that experiments at high-energy accelerators could create new forms of matter that would ultimately destroy the Earth has been considered several times in the past quarter century. One consequence of the earliest of these…

The physicists working in several areas of research know quite well the name of Ettore Majorana, since it is currently associated to fundamental concepts like {\it Majorana neutrinos} in particle physics and cosmology or {\it Majorana…

We will investigate some aspects of Stueckelberg's work, which have contributed to the development of modern physics. On the one hand, the definition of diffuse boundaries in the calculation of scattering amplitudes will be reviewed, and…

An account is given of an interesting but unknown theory by Majorana regarding scalar quantum electrodynamics, elaborated several years before the known Pauli-Weisskopf theory. Theoretical calculations and their interpretation are given in…

In December 1924 Wolfgang Pauli proposed the idea of an inner degree of freedom of the electron, which he insisted should be thought of as genuinely quantum mechanical in nature. Shortly thereafter Ralph Kronig and, independently, Samuel…

An account is given of the close collaboration of Dick Dalitz with the European K- Collaboration over many decades in many aspects of hypernuclear physics. In particular, emphasis is given to the topics of double hypernuclei and the…

In this note we follow the historical development of the ideas that led to the formulation of String Theory. We start from the inspired guess of Veneziano and its extension to the scattering of $N$ scalar particles, then we describe how the…

This part offers a survey of models proposed to cope with the symmetry-breaking challenge. Among them are the two-component neutrinos, the neutrino twins, the universal Fermi interaction, etc. Moreover, the broken discrete symmetries in…