物理学史与哲学

Cultures around the world organise stars into constellations, or asterisms, and these groupings are often considered to be arbitrary and culture-specific. Yet there are striking similarities in asterisms across cultures, and groupings such…

The 1703 was the first year of full operation of the meridian line in the Basilica of St. Maria degli Angeli in Rome. The instants of solstices and equinoxes, the \textit{Anni Cardines}, obtained by comparing transit timings of Sun and…

"El Cielo de Salamanca" ("The Sky of Salamanca") is a quarter-sphere-shaped vault 8.70 metres in diameter. It was painted sometime between 1480 and 1493 and shows five zodiacal constellations, three boreal and six austral. The Sun and…

The author reflects on the significance of Einstein's brain and the search for what makes it distinct.

Brief recollections by the author about how he contributed to the production of the Feynman Lectures in Physics

The article presents the results of a study of signs on a Bronze Age slab "Sun stone" discovered at the foot of Maja e Can in Volusnica massif (Prokletije National Park, Montenegro). Studies have shown that the slab is an analemmatic…

Brief recollections by the author about how he and Stephen Hawking arrived at the theory of the No-Boundary Quantum State of the Universe

The theoretical physicist and mathematician Aristophanes Dimakis passed away on July 8, 2021, at the age of 68, in Athens, Greece. We briefly review his life, career and scientific achievements.

The article suggests that quantum mechanics is a science of a new type, which refutes the classical metaphysical concept of reality. The notion of a quantum concept is introduced. The possibility of a Wittgensteinian 'dissolution' of the…

Our friend and colleague, Prof. Shoucheng Zhang, passed away in 2018, which was a great loss for the entire physics community. For all of us who knew Shoucheng, it is difficult to overcome the sadness and shock of his early departure.…

According to the standard model of cosmology, LambdaCDM, the mass-energy budget of the current stage of the universe is not dominated by the luminous matter that we are familiar with, but instead by some form of dark matter (and dark…

The n-body problem is one of the most important issue in Celestial Mechanics. This article aims to retrace the historical and scientific events that led the Paduan mathematician, Tullio Levi-Civita, to deal with the problem first from a…

In recent years the quantum foundations community has seen increasing interest in the possibility of using retrocausality as a route to rejecting the conclusions of Bell's theorem and restoring locality to quantum physics. On the other…

Quantum theory can be understood as pointing to an ontology of relations. I observe that this reading of quantum mechanics is supported by the ubiquity of relationality in contemporary fundamental physics, including in classical mechanics,…

Many scientists have expressed concerns about potential catastrophic risks associated with new technologies. But expressing concern is one thing, identifying serious candidates another. Such risks are likely to be novel, rare, and difficult…

Cornelis ("Kees") de Jager, co-founder of "Solar Physics", passed away in 2021. He was an exemplary human being, a great scientist, and had large impact on our field. In this tribute we first briefly summarize his life and career and then…

We analyze the Nobel prizes in physics for astrophysics and gravitation since the establishment of the prize and highlight the 2020 Nobel prize for black holes. In addition, we comment on the names that could have received the prize in…

We undertake a reconstruction of the epistemic significance of research on operational theories in quantum foundations. We suggest that the space of operational theories is analogous to the space of possible worlds employed in the possible…

Physicists are increasingly beginning to take seriously the possibility of laws outside the traditional time-evolution paradigm; yet our understanding of determinism is still predicated on a forwards time-evolution picture, making it…

We present a fully relational definition of inertial systems based in the No Arbitrariness Principle, that eliminates the need for absolute inertial frames of reference or distinguished reference systems as the "fixed stars" in order to…