物理学史与哲学

The aggregate appearance of the naked-eye stars would appear to Galileo to be direct observational support for his ideas about the stars, and indirect observational support for the Copernican theory over the rival Tychonic theory. Brief…

This article was originally written for scholarpedia.org. It describes the origins and related background of Bethe-Salpeter equation.

It is known that Sir Isaac Newton suggested a date for the Passion of Christ in the posthumously published "Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John" (1733). What was not known is that the first attempts to…

In the ancient Egypt seven goddesses, represented by seven cows, composed the celestial herd that provides the nourishment to her worshippers. This herd is observed in the sky as a group of stars, the Pleiades, close to Aldebaran, the main…

The "rigid bodies" must be in Relativity the "deformable bodies" where the longitudinal waves propagate with the maximun speed $c$. In 1909, Born studied the "relativistic underformable body" but made the mistake of calling it "rigid". The…

We consider the attitude of astronomers in Argentina in connection with the new problems posed by relativity theory, before and after GR was presented. We begin considering the sequence of "technical" publications that appeared and use it…

We review the life and remarkable contributions to Physics of Gregor Wentzel.

This article focuses on the problem of the authenticity of knowledge. It argues that the failure to integrate the observer into the act of observing is the main source of the disagreements and divisions in contemporary science and…

A comparison is made of the traditional Loschmidt (reversibility) and Zermelo (recurrence) objections to Boltzmann's H-theorem, and its simplified variant in the Ehrenfests' 1912 wind-tree model. The little-cited 1896 (pre-recurrence)…

Some verses of Dante Alighieri suggest his astrological sign and his probable date of birth. This leads us to reflect on the different methods, increasingly divergent, with which sciences as opposed to beliefs approach reality.

A concise survey of the contribution of D.I. Blokhintsev to the quantum physics, including solid state physics, physics of metals, surface physics, statistical physics and optics is given. These achievements have been considered in the…

Although Einstein's name is closely linked with the celebrated relation E = mc2 between mass and energy, a critical examination of the more than half dozen "proofs" of this relation that Einstein produced over a span of forty years reveals…

This is a review of the four-volume set entitled The Genesis of General Relativity edited by Juergen Renn, Springer, Dordrecht (2007)

Green's famous essay (Nottingham, 1828), with which he introduced the potential function, was transcribed from its reprint in Crelle's Journal (1850-54), with several typographical corrections and a reference section added. Green starts…

This submission has been withdrawn by arXiv admins because there was an erroneous author included in the original version.

Boltzmann's struggle with a derivation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is sketched. So is his first derivation of the connection between entropy and probability in 1877. Planck's derivation and quantum mechanical modifications of…

In an article published by Mauricio Nirenstein in 1925, a few months after the visit of Albert Einstein to Argentina, the author wrote various comments and references relative to the scientist's visit. In particular, Nirenstein mentioned a…

The rise of quantum mechanics is reviewed with special attention to the development between June 1925 and October 1927 when the Copenhagen interpretation was proposed.

Since the time of ancient civilizations, cosmology had a privileged place within the various artistic and literary manifestations. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, one of the masterpieces in literature and thought of the Western World,…

Quantum Eletrodynamics (QED) is considered as the most successful of all physical theories. It can predict numerical values of physical quantities to a spectacular degree of accuracy. However, from the very early days it has been known…