物理学史与哲学

Alex, the main discoverer of high Tc superconductivity, was also a dear friend. Here I offer a few frank anecdotes, possibly inaccurate in some details but heartfelt and accurate in the substance, as a personal tribute to our friendship.

Keith Brueckner was a theoretical physicist of considerable technical power who came of age as the mysteries of the atomic nucleus were coming into focus. His fundamental contributions to the "many-body problem" had a lasting impact on our…

Do the spacetime manifolds which feature in our best scientific theories reflect anything metaphysically weighty in the world (e.g., any fundamental substances or relations)? Should we extend our notions of space and time beyond the…

Weyl proposed a schema for symbolic construction of scientific representation starting from subjective immediate experience, and moving toward the objective ordered manifolds of possibilities due to "rational motives" of comprehending the…

This work analyzes the phase correlation of the three lunar cycles and the Saros/Exeligmos cycle, after the study of the chapter About Exeligmos in Introduction to the Phenomena by Geminus. Geminus, refers that each Exeligmos cycle began on…

Quantum gravity's suggestion that spacetime may be emergent and so only exist contingently would force a radical reconception of extant analyses of laws of nature. Humeanism presupposes a spatiotemporal mosaic of particular matters of fact…

Intuitively, the totality of physical reality -- the Cosmos -- has a beginning only if (i) all parts of the Cosmos agree on the direction of time (the Direction Condition) and (ii) there is a boundary to the past of all non-initial…

Both relativistic mechanics and Newtonian mechanics are based on principles that have ontological implications. We propose a series of formalisms that rigorously define the ontology underlying mechanical theories, in order to clarify and…

Margherita Hack observed with the Galileo telescope at the Asiago Astrophysical Observatory from September 1951 to March 1954. Using the spectroscopic facilities of the observatory, Margherita contributed to the stellar study of novae,…

I explain in what sense the structure of space and time is probably vague or indefinite, a notion I define. This leads to the mathematical representation of location in space and time by a vague interval. From this, a principle of…

As we approach the centenary of the discovery of quantum statistics in 1924, it is important to revisit Bose's original derivation of Planck's law usually ignored in most standard presentations of Bose-Einstein statistics. It introduced not…

The paper re-examines the principal methodological questions, arising in the debate over the cosmological standard model's postulate of Dark Matter vs. rivalling proposals that modify standard (Newtonian and general-relativistic)…

We develop and apply a multi-dimensional account of explanatory depth towards a comparative analysis of inflationary and bouncing paradigms in primordial cosmology. Our analysis builds on earlier work due to Azhar and Loeb (2021) that…

This article presents the most interesting philosophical issues as they arise in causal set theory. The first concerns the apparent disappearance of spacetime at the fundamental level. It shows how the looming empirical incoherence is…

This paper reviews and extends an approach to superluminal kinematics set forth by R. Sutherland and J. Shepanski in 1986. This theory is characterized by a spacetime with positive definite metric, a Lorentz factor of the form…

[Translation of and Commentary on L\'eon Rosenfeld's "Ueber die Gravitationwirkungen des Lichtes", Zeitschrift fur Physik 65: 589-599 (1930). Originally published in German. Submitted for publication on September 26, 1930. See [1] in the…

In 1929, Enrico Fermi wrote "Problemi attuali della fisica" ("Contemporary Problems of Physics"), a short article in Italian published in the magazine "Annali dell'istruzione media". The magazine was sponsored by the Italian Ministry of…

The notion that nature is subject to laws is exciting from many different viewpoints. This paper is based on the context of modern cosmology and presents a more philosophical discussion. It will list the significant interdisciplinary…

The Big Bang singularity in standard model cosmology suggests a program of study in 'early universe' quantum gravity phenomenology. Inflation is usually thought to undermine this program's prospects by means of a dynamical diluting…

The field of interpretation of quantum mechanics emerged in an attempt to solve the measurement problem. This turned on the perception that Niels Bohr avoided addressing the measurement problem by taking an instrumentalist view of quantum…