物理学史与哲学
Some personal memories of the Nobel Prize Winners 2022 Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger are summarized and the significance of their works is described in a historical perspective.
The folder containing the sheets of the Memoirs of Dilworth/Occhialini is kept in the Dilworth-Occhialini Archives at the BICF Library of the University of Milan. They cover the two English periods of Giuseppe Paolo Stanislao Occhialini…
In this paper, I review the book: Gary S. Berger, Michael DiRuggiero. "Einstein: The Man and His Mind." Bologna: Damiani, 2022. Illustrations. 209 pp. $70.00, cloth, ISBN 978-88-6208-784-1.
This is a homage to the memory of Prof. Steven Weinberg who passed away on 23 July 2021.
Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, long-haul oceanic voyages of exploration and discovery routinely carried astronomical tent observatories to support land-based longitude determinations using heavy and cumbersome…
The Inscriptions which were on the Back Cover of the Antikythera Mechanism were the Users Manual of the Antikythera Mechanism. In the Back Cover Inscription Part 1 text, the Presentation, Position, and Operation of the outer parts of the…
Richard Feynman famously said that nobody understands quantum mechanics and cautioned against asking: "But how can it be like that?" Something about the conceptual foundations of the theory is profoundly puzzling, but just what is so…
To systematically answer the generalized Kretschmann objection, we propose a mean to make operational a criterion widely recognized as allowing to decide if the gauge symmetry of a theory is artificial or substantial. Our proposition is…
This article aims to reconsider E. Schr\"odinger's famous thought experiment, the cat paradox experiment, and its place in quantum foundations from a new perspective, grounded in the type of interpretation of quantum phenomena and quantum…
The following is a translation of the paper by Walther Gerlach and Otto Stern that reported the first evidence for the quantisation of atoms in a magnetic field. The atoms have quantum states corresponding to a limited number of possible…
Recall first the algebraic treatment of flows or tensions in a transportation network $N$, i.e. a connected antisymmetric 1-graph $G(X, U)$. Assume that, unusually, we take the values of flows (resp. tensions) in $\mathbb{C}$. So the…
This paper presents an overview of the state of scientific research in physics in the Italian peninsula for the first thirty years of XIX century. In doing so, we focus geographically on the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Lombardo - Veneto…
Euler stressed the importance of hypotheses, which he thought were the only means of arriving at a certain knowledge of the physical causes, essential to establish the laws of physics. This thought was communicated to Emilie du Chatelet in…
Th\'eophile De Donder, a Belgian mathematician born in Brussels, elaborated two important ideas that created a bridge between thermodynamics and chemical kinetics. He invented the concept of the degree of advancement of a reaction, and, in…
On December 31 2022, the Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie (VRT), the national public-service broadcaster for the Flemish Community of Belgium, recovered a video recording of a 1964 interview of Georges Lema\^itre. Up until now,…
We discuss in this work the contradictory position in modern Physics between the existence of a microphysical quantum Reality and macrophysical classical one. After discussing some basic concepts in Philosophy, we revisit the situation of…
In his sixth problem, Hilbert called for an axiomatic approach to theoretical physics with an aim to achieve precision and rigour in scientific reasoning, where logic and language (semantics) of physics play the pivotal role. It is from…
This article presents the results of research into the causes of the Gibbs paradox in the formulation discussed by J. W. Gibbs himself. In this formulation, we are talking about an inexplicable (paradoxical) jump in the entropy of mixing of…
The laws of quantum mechanics are couched in subtle mathematical language. The laws are not usually stated in a compact pedagogical form. Here I present a possible way to correct this. Essential facts can be distilled into seven statements…
Functional epistemology is about ways to access functional objects by using varieties of methods and procedures. Not all such means are equally capable of reproducing these functions in the desired consistency and resolution. Dyson's…