物理学史与哲学

The extravagances of quantum mechanics never fail to enrich daily the debate around natural philosophy. Entanglement, non-locality, collapse, many worlds, many minds, and subjectivism have challenged generations of thinkers. Its approach…

We give a brief account of the history of neutrino, and how that most aloof of all particles has shaped our search for a theory of fundamental interactions ever since it was theoretically proposed. We introduce the necessary concepts and…

Not all symmetries are on a par. For instance, within Newtonian mechanics, we seem to have a good grasp on the empirical significance of boosts, by applying it to subsystems. This is exemplified by the thought experiment known as Galileo's…

Local gauge theories are in a complicated relationship with boundaries. Whereas fixing the gauge can often shave off unwanted redundancies, the coupling of different bounded regions requires the use of gauge-variant elements. Therefore,…

This article is an introductory work to a larger research project devoted to pure, applied and philosophical aspects of dimension theory. It concerns a novel approach toward an alternate dimension theory foundation: the point-dimension…

Carnap's conception of linguistic frameworks is widespread; however, it is not entirely clear nor consensual to pinpoint what is the influence in his stance within the traditional realist/anti-realist debate. In this paper, we place Carnap…

In this work we present an epistemic analysis of time phenomenon using the mathematical machinery of information theory and modular theory. By adopting limited commitment to the ontology of time evolution, and instead by mainly relying on…

Here we will discuss the philosophical differences between an approach to the deep nature of physical space based on the concept of coordinates and one based on the concept of relation. The philosophical superiority of the second approach…

The most debated status of the wave function of Quantum Mechanics is discussed in the light of the epistemological vs ontological opposition.

Memorial sessions celebrated Leon Lederman, Helen Edwards, and Burton Richter at the April 2019 Meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver. In the session entitled Honoring Leon Lederman, Sally Dawson gave an overview of Leon's…

The development of science and technology has progressively demonstrated the ability of humankind to understand and manipulate the physical world, and it has also shown some fundamental limitations to predictability of physical events. This…

We investigate a possible depiction of the famous SN 1054 event in specially minted coins produced in the Eastern Roman Empire in 1054 A.D. On these coins, we investigate if the head of the Emperor, Constantine IX, might represent the Sun…

Exactly one hundred years ago, in May 1922, Alexander Friedmann discovered that General Relativity (GR) predicts non-stationary Universe. His equation describing the evolution of the Universe is now named after him. In this paper we briefly…

I want to combine two hitherto largely independent research projects, scientific understanding and mechanistic explanations. Understanding is not only achieved by answering why-questions, that is, by providing scientific explanations, but…

The Anthropic Principle has been with us since the 1970s. This Principle is advanced to account for the "fine tuning" of the 25 constants of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Were these constants very different, life could not exist.…

I provide some philosophical groundwork for the recently proposed 'trans-Planckian censorship' conjecture in theoretical physics. In particular, I argue that structure formation in early universe cosmology is, at least as we typically…

This paper examines the incommensurability thesis - one of the most important and controversial ideas to emerge from the simultaneous work of Kuhn and Feyerabend. In the first half, I discuss three aspects of incommensurability -…

The relational interpretation of quantum mechanics (RQM), introduced in its present form by Carlo Rovelli in 1996, involves a number of significant departures from other QM interpretations widely discussed in the literature. We begin here…

A crucial step in the history of General Relativity was Einstein's adoption of the principle of general covariance which demands a coordinate independent formulation for our spacetime theories. General covariance helps us to disentangle a…

The Anthologies of the second-century astrologer Vettius Valens (120-c.175 CE) is the most extensive surviving practical astrological text from the period. Despite this, the theoretical underpinnings of the Anthologies have been…