物理学史与哲学

In the 17th and 18th centuries, several natural philosophers studied the phenomenon of refraction and attempted to obtain the Snell law from various assumptions. Lacking experimental data, it was generally believed that light travels faster…

Random sampling in high dimensions has successfully been applied to phenomena as diverse as nuclear resonances, neural networks and black hole evaporation. Here we revisit an elegant argument by the British physicist Dennis Sciama, which…

This paper is a continuation of a series of works, devoted to various aspects of the 1908 Tunguska event. It is devoted to the Evenki accounts of the 1908 Tunguska event collected in 1920s - 1930s. It is important to research accounts of…

Robert A. Millikan (1868-1953) was the second American to win the Nobel Prize in physics. At the peak of his influence, no scientist save Einstein was more admired by the American public. Millikan, the head of the California Institute of…

In this paper I introduce the idea of geometrogenesis as suggested in the group field theory literature and I offer a criticism of it. Geometrogenesis in the context of GFT is the idea that what we observe as the big bang is nothing else…

A standard line in the contemporary philosophical literature has it that physical theories are equivalent only when they agree on their empirical content, where this empirical content is often understood as being encoded in the equations of…

We analyse the scientific research carried out at the Institute of Physics of the National University of La Plata in the first half of the 20th century, and the cultural and social context in which they were immersed. We focus especially on…

Einstein presented the Hole Argument against General Covariance, understood as invariance with respect to a change of coordinates, as a consequence of his initial failure to obtain covariant equations that, in the weak static limit, contain…

Berta Karlik was an Austrian physicist who was not only among the early radioactivity researchers and nuclear physicists in Vienna, but also pioneered a woman's academic career in Austria. She was the first woman at the University of Vienna…

Physical systems are characterized by their structure and dynamics. But the physical laws only express relations, and their symmetries allow any possible relational structure to be also possible in a different parametrization or basis of…

Noel Frederick Smyth (NFS), a Fellow of the Australian Mathematical Society and a Professor of Nonlinear Waves in the School of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, passed away on February 5, 2023. NFS was a prominent figure among…

Comment on Herbert Bruderer's recent CACM contribution, providing additional citations to recent publications on Ada Lovelace and suggesting a correction to his conclusions.

Theoretical physics suffered a major loss with the death of my dear friend Jan Zaanen on January 18. This note is my remembrance of him.

The onset and the development of the concept of exchange force in quantum physics are historically reconstructed, starting from Heisenberg's seminal contributions in 1926 and going through the great developments in nuclear physics, which…

We consider conservation of momentum in AQUAL, a field-theoretic extension to Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). We show that while there is a sense in which momentum is conserved, it is only if momentum is attributed to the gravitational…

We examine the justification for taking the Event Horizon Telescope's famous 2019 image to be a reliable representation of the region surrounding a black hole. We argue that it takes the form of a robustness argument, with the resulting…

Antonie (Anton) Pannekoek (1873-1960) is remembered as one of the initiators of the field of stellar atmospheres. A second part of his research concerned Galactic astronomy. He was convinced that the sidereal system was built up of clouds…

I present aspects of causal set theory (a research programme in quantum gravity) as being en route to achieving a reduction of Lorentzian geometry to causal sets. I take reduction in philosophers' sense; and I argue that the prospects are…

This article was published in 2001 in Festschrift "At the Frontier of Particle Physics; Handbook of QCD", Ed. M. Shifman, (World Scientific, Singapore, 2001), Vol. 1, page 126. Asymptotic freedom as the basic property of QCD was discovered…

The year 2022 marked the 200th anniversary of the first appearance of the Navier-Stokes equation, a landmark in Fluid Dynamics introduced by Claude-Louis Navier in 1822. This equation revolutionized the understanding of fluid motion by…