物理学史与哲学
The late-sixteenth century witnessed a major expansion of Dutch shipping activity from northern European waters to the Indian Ocean and beyond. At a time when the Renaissance had just arrived on the North Sea's shores, scientist-scholars,…
My discussions with John Bell about reality in quantum mechanics are recollected. I would like to introduce the reader to Bell's vision of reality which was for him a natural position for a scientist. Bell had a strong aversion against…
We will read, through the Emmy Noether paper and the two concepts of `proper' and `improper' conservation laws, the problem, posed by Hilbert, of the nature of the law of conservation of energy in the theory of General Relativity.…
Philosophers now seem to agree that frequentism is an untenable strategy to explain the meaning of probabilities. Nevertheless, I want to revive frequentism, and I will do so by grounding probabilities on typicality in the same way as the…
This paper explores the options available to the anti-realist to defend a Quinean empirical under-determination thesis using examples of dualities. I first explicate a version of the empirical under-determination thesis that can be brought…
A hero or a god, wearing an oriental garb and a Phrygian cap, presses his body on that of a bull to subdue it. With his flexed knee he presses the back of the animal and holds its head with his left hand, while with his right hand he stabs…
In this contribution in honour of Paul Busch, we criticise the claims of many expositions that the time-energy uncertainty principle allows both a violation of energy conservation, and particle creation, provided that this happens for a…
The first idea of establishing a public astronomical observatory in Florence, Capital of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, dates to the mid of the 18th century. Initially, the use of a low building on a high ground was proposed, and the hill of…
Peter Bergmann and his students embarked in 1949 on a mainly canonical quantization program whose aim was to take into account the underlying four-dimensional diffeomorphism symmetry in the transition from a Lagrangian to a Hamiltonian…
The essay argues that the standard cosmological model is one sided and incomplete. Its recognition of the primacy of radiant energy has no rational justification and empirical verification and, therefore, is arbitrary and subjective. The…
Understanding the quantum measurement problem is closely associated with understanding wave function collapse. Motivated by Breuer's claim that it is impossible for an observer to distinguish all states of a system in which it is contained,…
A new mathematics, the constructive one, characterizes a singular limit as undecidable. Hence, a singular limit between two theories actually represents a difference between two different kinds of mathematics. This particular situation…
The Magellanic Clouds were known before Magellan's voyage exactly 500 years ago, and were not given that name by Magellan himself or his chronicler Antonio Pigafetta. They were, of course, already known by local populations in South…
The Picture Rocks Sun Dagger is a spiral petroglyph on a hillside northwest of Tucson that shows sun dagger events at both the summer solstice and the equinoxes. On each of these dates, a wedge-shaped sunbeam with opening angles…
An indeterministic interpretation of classical physics has been proposed recently, in which the argument relies on attacking an alleged unwarranted metaphysical hidden assumption of the standard deterministic interpretation. This short…
In an earlier paper~\cite{Luu:2019jmb} we discussed emergence from the context of effective field theories, particularly as related to the fields of particle and nuclear physics. We argued on the side of reductionism and weak emergence.…
It is commonly argued that an undesirable feature of a theoretical or phenomenological model is that salient observables are sensitive to values of parameters in the model. But in what sense is it undesirable to have such 'fine-tuning' of…
Crucial experiments have a long history of contributions to progress in physics. Similarly, we claim that in the period roughly from 1955 to 1985 crucial calculations played a significant role in setting the agenda for elementary particle…
The Lorentz aether theory was the mathematically equivalent precursor to the special theory of relativity (SR). It assumed the existence of a static aether filling space in which particles are affected by the Lorentz factor for length…
We discuss some methodological aspects of the relation between physics and metaphysics by dealing specifically with the case of non-relativistic quantum mechanics. Our main claim is that current attempts to productively integrate quantum…