物理学史与哲学
In 1755, Kant published his General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, in which he presented his hypothesis on the formation of the solar system, known as the primitive nebula hypothesis. This original theory of the heavens was…
The Dirac negative energy sea introduced the concept of antimatter, and explained it, not least in its relationship to negative-energy solutions to the wave equation. Post-war, it was largely displaced by what I shall call the 'standard…
The hole argument of general relativity threatens a radical and pernicious form of indeterminism. One natural response to the argument is that points belonging to different but isometric models should always be identified, or…
In this essay I will consider a sequence of questions. The first questions concern the biological function of intelligence in general, and cognitive prostheses of human intelligence in particular. These will lead into questions concerning…
This is an English (annotated) translation of the German paper by Max Planck (1943) about "The history of the discovery of the physical quantum of action"
This is an English (annotated) translation of the German paper by Max Planck (1887) about "The principle of the conservation of energy"
This is an English (annotated) translation of the Habilitation-Thesis report (in German) of Max Planck at the University of Munich (1880)
This is an English (annotated) translation of the Thesis report (in German) of Max Planck at the University of Munich (1879)
Recently uncovered archives at the University of Franche-Comt\'e in Besan\c{c}on (France) reveal a rich history of research and teaching in physics since the Faculty of Science was first established in 1845. Here, we describe a selection of…
The self-interaction spin-2 approach to general relativity (GR) has been extremely influential in the particle physics community. Leaving no doubt regarding its heuristic value, we argue that a view of the metric field of GR as nothing but…
Starting from general considerations, some ideas of the philosopher Derek Parfit on consciousness, self-awareness, and reductionism are briefly reviewed and critically examined from the standpoint of physics.
Recent philosophical discussions about metaphysical indeterminacy have been substantiated with the idea that quantum mechanics, one of the most successful physical theories in the history of science, provides explicit instances of worldly…
This paper provides an overview of work, published since the opening of the archives of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the end of the twentieth century, regarding the Vatican confronting evolution in the…
We give some personal reflections on the person and scientist Lars Brink and on some of his scientific achievements. Our relations to Lars are briefly described in [1] and [2], while the sources relevant for this text are summarised in [3].
This article advances the hypothesis that the heightened eschatological sensitivity evident among the historians writing in the 5th century and its weaker echos in the time of Charlemagne were caused by the irregularities of the the…
This is a historian's view of how modern astronomy data can be used to discuss the shifting historical worldview of Late Antiquity. In this article an attemp is made to construct an approximate model of how the cycles of astronomical…
Most contemporary physicists hold that the local validity of special relativity (SR) within general relativity (GR) is expressed by means of an interdependent cluster of mathematical concepts, one of which is the existence of normal…
A re-examination of a well-known iconographic source, the "Allegory of Sight" by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, reveals that one of the two telescopes depicted in the painting has a highly unusual,and until now unknown to the…
The theory of regularity is a philosophical perspective in which laws of nature are just descriptions, that is to say, laws of nature do not govern the world. Moreover, according to the theory of regularity, the number of laws of nature…
We present a new analysis of the positions of holes beneath the calendar ring of the Antikythera mechanism, as measured by Budiselic et al. (2020). We significantly refine their estimate for the number of holes that were present in the full…