物理学史与哲学

The nature of time has beguiled philosophers for nearly three millennia. There are myriad types of time including cosmological time, biological time, psychological time, physical time, historical time, and even theological time. My brief…

Between the time of the discovery of nuclear fission in early 1939 and the end of 1946, approximately 90 nuclear piles were constructed in six countries. These devices ranged from simple graphite columns containing neutron sources but no…

Although governments across Europe had realised the need to incentivise the development of practically viable longitude solutions as early as the late-sixteenth century, the English government was late to the party. An sense of urgency…

Despite frequent references in modern reviews to a seventeenth-century Venetian longitude prize, only a single, circumstantial reference to the alleged prize is known from contemporary sources. Edward Harrison's scathing assessment of the…

I review the meaning of General Relativity (GR), viewed as a dynamical field, rather than as geometry, as effected by the 1958-61 anti-geometrical work of ADM. This very brief non-technical summary, is intended for historians.

It is usually stated in the literature that Geneva was the first city to adopt mean solar time, in 1780, followed by London (or the whole of England) in 1792, Berlin in 1810 and Paris in 1816. In this short paper I will partially revise…

It is argued that although quantum theory isn't an absolutely deterministic theory, it is partially deterministic. The approach followed here is in the framework of the standard (Copenhagen interpretation of) quantum mechanics without any…

This article contributes to a global history of relativity, by exploring how Einstein's theory was appropriated in Belgium. This may sound as a contradiction in terms, yet the early-twentieth-century Belgian context, because of its cultural…

The general concept of symmetry is realized in manifold ways in different realms of reality, such as plants, animals, minerals, mathematical objects or human artefacts in literature, fine arts and society. In order to arrive at a common…

The history of the development of Monte Carlo methods to solve the many-body problem in quantum mechanics is presented. The survey starts with the early attempts with the first available computers just after the war and extends until the…

We present an archaeoastronomical study of the orientations of the colonial Christian churches on the island of Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands, Spain, mostly built from the period of the Norman conquest in the 15th century to the 19th…

Quantum Theory and Humeanism have long been thought to be incompatible due to the irreducibility of the correlations involved in entangled states. In this paper, we reconstruct the tension between Humeanism and entanglement via the concept…

While the LCDM framework has been incredibly successful for modern cosmology, it requires the admission of two mysterious substances as a part of the paradigm, dark energy and dark matter. Although this framework adequately explains most of…

The main focus is on the Hamilton-Jacobi techniques in classical general relativity that were pursued by Peter Bergmann and Arthur Komar in the 1960's and 1970's. They placed special emphasis on the ability to construct the factor group of…

This is a short memoriam celebrating the life and work of the general relativist Joshua N. Goldberg, who passed away in October, 2020.

Noncommutative geometries generalize standard smooth geometries, parametrizing the noncommutativity of dimensions with a fundamental quantity with the dimensions of area. The question arises then of whether the concept of a region smaller…

Noether's first theorem does not establish a one-way explanatory arrow from symmetries to conservation laws, but such an arrow is widely assumed in discussions of the theorem in the physics and philosophy literature. It is argued here that…

The feud between Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton has remained ongoing even after 300 years, over whether Newton should have acknowledged Hooke's influence on his graphical method of constructing planet orbits, the celebrated Proposition 1,…

The law of centripetal force governing the motion of celestial bodies in eccentric conic sections, has been established and thoroughly investigated by Sir Isaac Newton in his Principia Mathematica. Yet its profound implications on the…

In 1988, in cooperation with a team of experimental physicists, a Condensed Matter theorist, X, published in Physical Review Letters a crucial experimental result dealing with a revolutionary new theory. The conclusions of the paper were…