物理学史与哲学

In the nineteenth century, the Netherlands quickly adopted the time ball -- a British innovation for maritime chronometer calibration -- in its main naval ports (Nieuwediep/Den Helder, Vlissingen, Hellevoetsluis) and commercial centres…

A new contextualised reading of Fritz Zwicky's 1933 article ''The redshift of extragalactic nebulae'' about the virial analysis of the velocity dispersion of galaxies in the Coma cluster leads to a reconsideration of the traditional…

Why do physicists almost universally take the direction of positive rotation to be counterclockwise, and three-dimensional coordinates to be right-handed? This paper traces the historical development of these chiral conventions, with an…

C.V. Raman (1888-1970) was one of the pioneering scientists to have emerged from India during the colonial era. His scientific explorations were driven by his curiosity to understand wave phenomena. Naturally, optics and related physical…

Although several accounts of scientific understanding exist, the concept of understanding in relation to technology remains underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a philosophical account of technological understanding:…

When modelling spacetime and classical physical fields, one typically assumes smoothness (infinite differentiability). But this assumption and its philosophical implications have not been sufficiently scrutinized. For example, we can appeal…

I discuss the physical basis of classical mechanics, such as expressed commonly using the framework of Newton's Principia. Newton's formulation of the laws of motion is seen to have quite a few ambiguities and shortcomings. Therefore I…

David Bohm has put forward the first deterministic interpretation of quantum physics, and for this he seems to be regarded as a champion of determinism by physicists (both his contemporaries and the supporters of his interpretation, the…

We explain the achievements that were awarded 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, as well as the preceding and the later developments. The main notions and historic cornerstones of Bell inequalities, the related researches on quantum entanglement…

Symmetry is often treated in philosophy of physics as an interpretive problem. A particularly lively dispute concerns local symmetries: do they indicate surplus structure that ought to be expunged, or are they merely a harmless redundancy?…

Scale invariance has received very little attention in physics. Nevertheless, it provides a natural conceptual foundation for a relational understanding of the universe, where absolute size loses meaning and only dimensionless ratios retain…

We critically revisit Einstein's 1905 heuristic argument for lightquanta, considering its internal coherence and the scope of its applicability. We argue that Einstein's reasoning, often celebrated for its originality, is ambiguous because…

This paper provides a detailed historical account of early debates over wave-function realism, the modern term for the view that the wave function of quantum theory is physically real. As this paper will show, the idea of physical waves…

I argue that spacetime singularities entail no ontological commitment to material entities. First, I show that Penrose's singularity theorem is best understood as a theorem of incompleteness, it demonstrates the failure of specific…

What happens to a unified conscious field when its physical implementation straddles a black hole event horizon? This paper addresses that question for integration-based theories, including Integrated Information Theory, Global Workspace…

We distinguish two different concepts of time that play a role in physics: \textit{geometric time} and \textit{creative time}. The former is the time of deterministic physics and merely parametrizes a given evolution. The latter is instead…

We analyze in some detail the years leading up to Albert Einstein's visit to Argentina, from the moment he rose to fame after the publication of the results of the 1919 solar eclipse, until his arrival at the port of Buenos Aires in March…

Aim of this paper is to retrace the path that led the young Enrico Fermi to write his paper on the statistics of an ideal monatomic gas. This discovery originated in his interest, which he had shown since his formative years, in the…

I argue for an approach to the Foundations of Physics that puts the question in the title center stage, rather than asking "what is the case in the world?". This approach, algorithmic idealism, attempts to give a mathematically rigorous…

This paper elaborates on the implications of the relationship between the Second and Third Laws and provides a comprehensive formal and historical justification for the logical redundancy of the Nernst heat theorem. By revisiting the…