物理学史与哲学

Albert Einstein's journey to formulate the theory of general relativity involved significant shifts in his approach to gravitational field equations. Starting in 1912, he collaborated with Marcel Grossmann and initially explored broadly…

How does one formalize the structure of structures necessary for the foundations of physics? This work is an attempt at conceptualizing the metaphysics of pregeometric structures, upon which new and existing notions of quantum geometry may…

We present a methodological argument to refute the so-called many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum theory. Several known criticisms in the literature have already pointed out problematic aspects of this interpretation, such as the…

The formulation of a measurement theory for relativistic quantum field theory (QFT) has recently been an active area of research. In contrast to the asymptotic measurement framework that was enshrined in QED, the new proposals aim to supply…

We present an extensive archaeoastronomical study of the orientations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit churches in the lands of the historic viceroyalty of New Spain. Our sample includes forty-one chapels and churches located…

In the early 1880s, Henri Poincar\'e discovered a new equilibrium figure for uniformly-rotating fluid masses -- the pear, or piriform figure -- and speculated that in certain circumstances the pear splits into two unequal parts, and…

A short phenomenological account of the genesis and evolution of the universe is presented with emphasis on the primordial phases as well as its physical composition, i.e. dark matter and dark energy. We discuss Einstein's theory of General…

In 1850, Foucault was the first to compare experimentally the velocity of light in air to its velocity in water. And as the wave and projectile theories competing at the time predicted inverse results to such a measurement, Foucault…

In his Theory of Light and Colours, presented to the Royal Society in November 1801, Thomas Young defended a mechanical explanation of the coloured fringes observed outside of the shadow of an opaque object-the so-called 'colours by…

We consider the duality between General Relativity and the theory of Einstein algebras, in the extended setting where one permits non-Hausdorff manifolds. We show that the duality breaks down, and then go on to discuss a sense in which…

We review the literature on possible violations of the superposition principle for electromagnetic fields in vacuum from the earliest studies until the emergence of renormalized QED at the end of the 1940's. The exposition covers…

The Feynman demonstration that electromagnetic field momentum is real-even for static fields-can be made more pedagogically useful by simplifying its geometry. Instead of Feynman's disk with charged balls on its surface, this article uses…

Ancient astronomers faced the problem of dealing with arcs and angles in their observations and predictions without the help of modern trigonometry. The usual method to deal with such problems was the Menelaus Theorem, explicitly discussed…

We retrace the first steps towards understanding neutrinos, particles predicted by Pauli in 1930 to avoid a supposed violation of time-translation symmetry. Despite the tendency to reduce the whole story to his intuition and the skill of…

In this paper, it is demonstrated that there is a parallelism between the relational interpretation of Rovelli and the interpretation of soft matter based on intermediate asymptotics. The general interpretation of physics strongly assumes…

This paper explores the enduring black hole information and firewall paradoxes, challenges that have prompted many proposals, conjectures, and theories. Noteworthy among these are the ER = EPR conjecture and AdS/CFT correspondence, which…

Some physicists believe that superselection rules should be implemented to get rid of inconsistencies when a theory is framed in terms of a new mathematical formulation, whilst others think that this new formulation should be modified…

Many attempts have been made to characterise and solve the infamous measurement problem of quantum mechanics by advocating, implicitly or explicitly, different realist perspectives. As a result, we are still uncertain where this problem and…

David Bohm has often been considered unable to understand the meaning of the quantum revolution as well as its radical metaphysical implications. Similarly, his pilot-wave theory was negatively portrayed as an attempt to restore a classical…

This work aims at providing some (further) perspective into the analysis of two well-known datasets in terms of the methods of linear regression. The first set has been taken from Hubble's 1929 investigation of the relation between the…