物理学史与哲学

Since the beginning of the 20th century, a continuous evolution and perfection of what we today call the standard cosmological model has been produced, although some authors like to distinguish separate periods within this evolution. A…

We adopt a top-down approach to agency aimed at developing a minimalist, scalable and naturalized account of it. After providing a general definition, we explore some possible extensions and refinements, domain of applicability, as well as…

Despite quantum theory's remarkable success, many philosophers worry that it nonetheless lacks some crucial connection between theory and experiment. One under-discussed aspect of the Quantum Measurement Problems is that it is sometimes…

In 1939 Albert Einstein wrote a technical article that argued against the possibility that a star can be contracted to a single point: particles making up the star would end up rotating at velocities that were too high. In the same year,…

Ever since its beginnings, standard quantum mechanics has been associated with a metaphysical view according to which the theory deals with non-individual objects, i.e., objects deprived of individuality in some sense of the term. We shall…

K. Barad proposes "agential realism" as a unified approach to natural and social phenomena. The position is inspired by quantum mechanics and in particular the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. Barad also sees similarities between her…

According to one possible diagnosis of the quantum measurement problem, it is a consequence of quantum fundamentalism claiming that ontology and epistemology of the world are exclusively quantum, and classical physics is only an…

This is a brief account of the life and work of G\"oran Lindblad.

Recently there has been significant interest in using causal modelling techniques to understand the structure of physical theories. However, the notion of `causation' is limiting - insisting that a physical theory must involve causal…

This paper investigates the historical origin and ancestors of typicality, which is now a central concept in Boltzmannian Statistical Mechanics and Bohmian Mechanics. Although Ludwig Boltzmann did not use the word typicality, its main idea,…

On the occasion of centenary of superconductivity discovery I recall some facts from the first period and attempts to understand the phenomenon. It turns out that most famous physicists of the first half of XX century have tried to solve…

I dissent from the standard assertion of a "Two Times Problem," in which physical time is taken as being at odds with the human sense of a "flow of time." I provide a brief overview of the case to be made for the contrary view: namely, that…

Conservation laws that are based on the divergence of a second-rank four-tensor are fundamentally different from conservation laws based on the divergence of a four-vector. This article investigates the consequences of this difference for…

A short account of the life of Amy Ogle, who, in 1876, was the first woman to come top of the Natural Sciences Tripos at Cambridge.

We examine evaluations of the contributions of Matrix Mechanics and Max Born to the formulation of quantum mechanics from Heisenberg's Helgoland paper of 1925 to Born's Nobel Prize of 1954. We point out that the process of evaluation is…

The article reveals the error that in classical thermodynamics leads to the Gibbs paradox. The essence of the error lies in the fact that the entropy of an ideal gas is attributed to additive quantities, but it is not correct. The value of…

Arguing from his "hole" thought experiment, Einstein became convinced that, in cases in which the energy-momentum-tensor source vanishes in a spacetime hole, a solution to his general relativistic field equation cannot be uniquely…

Entropy bounds have played an important role in the development of holography as an approach to quantum gravity, so in this article we seek to gain a better understanding of the covariant entropy bound. We observe that there is a possible…

Most existing proposals to explain the temporal asymmetries we see around us are sited within an approach to physics based on time evolution, and thus they typically put the asymmetry in at the beginning of time in the form of a special…

This article proposes a mathematical model of an inverted analemmatic sundial, provides formulas for calculating the coordinates of their hour markers. On the example of the Belogorsk sundial, a method is described for determining the…