物理学史与哲学

As the Manhattan Project shifted to the theory of implosion assembly in 1944, plutonium was extremely rare and large uncertainties surrounded the function of the Gadget. For these reasons, a team within the Manhattan Project began another…

Criticality experiments with $^{235}$U (metal and hydride) and $^{239}$Pu (metal) were performed during the Manhattan Project. Results from these experiments provided necessary information for the success of the Manhattan Project. These…

On July 16, 1945, the Trinity nuclear test exploded in the desert near Alamogordo, NM. A variety of new diagnostic experiments were fielded in an effort to understand the detailed performance of the nuclear device. This article describes a…

This work reviewed the historical literature associated with the Dragon experiment and Water Boiler reactors operated at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Frisch's invited talk given at the Fast Burst Reactor Conference held the…

Nuclear physics advances in the US and Britain, from 1939-1945, are described. The Manhattan Project's work led to an explosion in our knowledge of nuclear science. A conference in April 1943 at Los Alamos provided a simple formula used to…

The Trinity test of July 16, 1945 marked the scientific apex of the Manhattan Project. Often recognized as the symbolic birth of the nuclear age, Trinity's multifaceted legacy remains just as captivating and complex as it did 75 years ago.…

This article is set during the 1944 and 1945 final push to complete Project Y -- the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos -- and focuses primarily on overcoming the challenge of creating and demonstrating a successful convergent explosive…

This article presents a brief historical review of G. I. Taylor's solution of the point blast wave problem which was applied to the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb. Lie group symmetry techniques are used to derive Taylor's famous…

This article describes the history of the computing facility at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, 1944 to 1946. The hand computations are briefly discussed, but the focus is on the IBM Punch Card Accounting Machines (PCAM). During…

A collection of articles reviewing Trinity on its 75th anniversary.

It will be presented in this chapter a historical account of the consistent histories interpretation of quantum mechanics based on primary and secondary literature. Firstly, the formalism of the consistent histories approach will be…

No-go theorems have played an important role in the development and assessment of scientific theories. They have stopped whole research programs and have given rise to strong ontological commitments. Given the importance they obviously have…

This paper comprehensively explores Stephen Hawking's interaction with Jacob Bekenstein. Both Hawking and Bekenstein benefited from the interaction with each other. It is shown that Hawking's interaction with Bekenstein drove him to solve…

I examine the debate between substantivalists and relationalists about the ontological character of spacetime and conclude it is not well posed. I argue that the so-called Hole Argument does not bear on the debate, because it provides no…

An energy condition, in the context of a wide class of spacetime theories (including general relativity), is, crudely speaking, a relation one demands the stress-energy tensor of matter satisfy in order to try to capture the idea that…

This paper analyzes the experiment presented in 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration that unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87. The very first question asked by the EHT…

John Couch Adams predicted the location of Neptune in the sky, calculated the expectation of the change in the mean motion of the Moon due to the Earth's pull, and determined the origin and the orbit of the Leonids meteor shower which had…

To demarcate the limits of experimental knowledge we probe the limits of what might be called an experiment. By appeal to examples of scientific practice from astrophysics and analogue gravity, we demonstrate that the reliability of…

During a series of experiments performed between 1907 and 1911, Domenico Pacini (Marino 1878-Roma 1934), at that time researcher at the Central Bureau of Meteorology and Geodynamics in Roma, studied the origin of the radiation today called…

About a century ago, cosmic rays were identified as being a source of radiation on Earth. The proof came from two independent experiments. The Italian physicist Domenico Pacini observed the radiation strength to decrease when going from the…