物理学史与哲学

Experiments in particle physics have hitherto failed to produce any significant evidence for the many explicit models of physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) that had been proposed over the past decades. As a result, physicists have…

High-level Chinese cartographic developments predate European innovations by several centuries. Whereas European cartographic progress -- and in particular the search for a practical solution to the perennial "longitude problem" at sea --…

The modeling of black holes is an important desideratum for any quantum theory of gravity. Not only is a classical black hole metric sought, but also agreement with the laws of black hole thermodynamics. In this paper, we describe how these…

The preprint is an English translation of the paper by famous astrophysicist Samuil Kaplan (1921-1978) "O krugovykh orbitakh v teorii tyagoteniya Einsteina (On circular orbits in Einstein's theory of gravitation)", published in 1949 in the…

Soon after he proposed three classic observational tests for the general theory of relativity, Einstein realised that a consistent description of the universe as a whole provided another important challenge for the theory. In this essay, we…

Steven Weinberg, renowned particle theorist and Nobel laureate, passed away in July 2021. We discuss selections of his work on effective field theory, electroweak unification, and symmetry related topics. We then add a few memories of…

In the early 1930s, the positron, pair production, and, at last, positron annihilation were discovered. Over the years, several scientists - commonly, Thibaud and Joliot - have been credited with the discovery of the annihilation radiation.…

Celebrating fifty years of collaboration and friendship with Chris Isham.

According to scientific realism, science gives us an approximately true description of what the world is like. But what does it mean? In this chapter, we focus on the ontological and metaphysical aspects of this discussion. That is, we are…

We present a mechanical model of a quasi-elastic body (aether) which reproduces Maxwell's equations with charges and currents. Major criticism against mechanical models of electrodynamics is that any presence of charges in the known models…

Surprisingly, the question "Is there Life in the Universe outside Earth?" has been raised, in rational terms, almost only in the western literature throughout the ages. In a first part I justify this statement. Then I try to develop an…

According to Aristotle "time is the number of change with respect to the before and after". That's certainly a vague concept, but at the same time it's both simple and satisfying from a philosophical point of view: things do not change…

The special composition question (SCQ), which asks under which conditions objects compose a further object, establishes a central debate in modern metaphysics. Recent successes of inductive metaphysics, which studies the implications of the…

Few things in physics have caused so much hand-wringing as von Neumann's collapse hypothesis. Unable to derive it mathematically, von Neumann attributed it to interaction with the observer's brain! Few physicists agreed, but tweaks of von…

Observation of auroras at low latitudes is an extremely rare event typically associated with major magnetic storms due to intense Earth-directed Coronal Mass Ejections. Since these energetic events represent one of the most important…

In this paper, I comment on a recent paper by Michel Janssen and J\"urgen Renn. In his published paper of November 18, 1915, Einstein presented a solution to the problem of the perihelion motion of Mercury and obtained the correct result of…

The physics at Frascati in the years 60's - 70's is reviewed together with the role played by Bruno Touschek

This is a write-up of Sidney Coleman's classic lecture first given as a Dirac Lecture at Cambridge University and later recorded when repeated at the New England sectional meeting of the American Physical Society (April 9, 1994). My sources…

After reminding the main issues at stake in the famous Einstein-Bohr debate initiated in 1935, we tentatively propose a way to get them closer, thus shedding a new light on this historical discussion.

Objecting that Sommerfeld's quantum conditions refer to particular coordinates, Einstein proposes a canonically invariant rule. But even if the invariance is canonical, Einstein may have in mind a double \emph{configuration} space…