物理学史与哲学
The origins of the series of European Cosmic-Ray Symposia are briefly described. The first meeting in the series, on Hadronic Interactions and Extensive Air Showers, held in Lodz, Poland in 1968, was attended by the author: some memories…
Voyages of exploration often included astronomers among their crew to aid with maritime navigation. William Dawes, a British Marine who had been trained in practical astronomy, was assigned to the "First Fleet", a convoy of eleven ships…
Thermodynamic macro variables, such as the temperature or volume macro variable, can take on a continuum of allowable values, called thermodynamic macro values. Although referring to the same macro phenomena, the macro variables of…
Bohmian mechanics grounds the predictions of quantum mechanics in precise dynamical laws for a primitive ontology of point particles. In an appraisal of the de-Broglie-Bohm theory, the paper discusses the crucial epistemological and…
In a recent paper in Antiquity (Darvill 2022), the author has proposed that the project of the <<sarsen>> phase (stage 2) of Stonehenge (c. 2600 BC) was conceived in order to represent a calendar year of 365.25 days, that is, a calendar…
On November 12, 1802, Thomas Young lays down in front of the Royal Society of London his Theory of Light and Colours. In this text, he defends a vibratory model or light, in which the peculiar attention he gives to the consequence of the…
On November 27, 1800, Thomas Young presents for the second time to the Royal Society of London his theory of the musclurity of the crystalline lens, as being the cause of the accommodation of the eye to different distances. This question…
The Caral civilization developed on the north-central coast of Peru and had an occupation period between 2870 and 1970 years BC. The first studies carried out in the field of archaeoastronomy showed evidence of possible astronomical…
Research in foundations of physics is stagnant, as claimed by many scientists during the last years. I suggest that one reason might be the reification of language, particularly of mathematics, which favour the search for answers to wrong…
Functionalism is the view that being x is to play the role of x. This paper defends a functionalist account of three-dimensional entities in the context of Wave Function Realism (WFR), that can explain in detail how we can recover…
Handedness, or chirality, has been a continuing source of inspiration across a wide range of scientific problems. After a quick review of some important, instructive historical examples, I present three contemporary case studies involving…
Vienna today is one of the capitals for the research on foundations of quantum physics. In this paper we reconstruct the main historical steps of the development of modern physics in Vienna, with an emphasis on quantum foundations. We show…
Karl Popper and Paul Feyerabend have been among the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century. Extensive studies have been dedicated to the development of their controversial relationship, which saw Feyerabend…
This is an English translation of a paper by the French physicist Alfred Potier (1840-1905) that originally appeared 150 years ago [A. Potier, ``Recherches sur l'int\'egration d'un syst\`eme d'\'equations aux diff\'erentielles partielles…
The notions of cause and effect are widely employed in science. I discuss why and how they are rooted into thermodynamics. The entropy gradient (i) explains in which sense interventions affect the future rather than the past, and (ii)…
Among the various remarkable contributions of Giorgio Parisi to physics, his formulation of the replica symmetry breaking solution for the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model stands out. In this article, different historical sources are used to…
We dedicate this to the life and work of Robin Hudson -- a mathematical physicist who developed the peerless quantum stochastic calculus, but who also inspired generations of researchers with both his intellect and wit.
What, if anything, can help us explain the dynamical behavior of matter? One may be tempted here to appeal to the laws of nature, or to the world's geometric structure, or even to the smooth topological structure of the spacetime manifold…
`Shallow' and `deep' versions of scientific realism may be distinguished as follows: the shallow realist is satisfied with belief in the existence of the posits of our best scientific theories; by contrast, deep realists claim that realism…
The work of S. Kichenassamy (1926-2015) in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics covers the spectrum of Relativistic Physics: from the clarification of the postulational basis of the two theories of Relativity, to applications to the…