物理学史与哲学
Half a century after a man first set foot on the moon it is interesting to revisit the occasion with a measure of hindsight. From the point of view of basic science the greatest achievement concerned the implementation of the Nordtvedt…
The abstract notion of a Universal Turing machine cannot exist as a physical subsystem without the introduction of noise from an external energy source. Like all other physical systems, physical Turing machines must convert energy sourced…
In the past century many fundamental results on unpredictability, undecidability and uncertainty have compelled scientists to grapple with the idea that some questions may never be resolved within our current theories. While this…
We propose to interpret the dark universe (dark matter and dark energy) of the current cosmological standard model as emerging together with ordinary matter, from the quantum vacuum, which de Broglie called the "universal substratum". It…
The possibility of algorithmic consciousness depends on the assumption that conscious states can be copied or repeated by sufficiently duplicating their underlying physical states, leading to a variety of paradoxes, including the problems…
Must a theory of quantum gravity have some truth to it if it can recover general relativity in some limit of the theory? This paper answers this question in the negative by indicating that general relativity is multiply realizable in…
In the history of the discovery tools of last century particle physics, central stage is taken by elementary particle accelerators and in particular by colliders. In their start and early development, a major role was played by the Austrian…
This dissertation is focused on the role of objectivity in peer review. Through an examination of aspects of peer review including anonymity, trust, expertise, and the question of who has standing to evaluate research, we find that…
We give a conceptually simple proof of nonlocality using only the perfect correlations between results of measurements on distant systems discussed by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen---correlations that EPR thought proved the incompleteness of…
In 1911 Einstein proposed that light-bending by the Sun's gravitational field could be measured during a total solar eclipse. The first opportunity in which this measurement would be tried, was during the total solar eclipse of October 10,…
Soon after Einstein's calculation of the effect of the Sun's gravitational field on the propagation of light in 1911, astronomers around the world tried to measure and verify the value. If the first attempts in Brazil in 1912 or Imperial…
The so-called Received View (RV) on quantum non-individuality states, basically, that quantum particles are not individuals. It has received an amount of criticism in the recent literature, most of it concerning the relation between the RV…
This text offers reminiscences of my personal interactions with Roman Jackiw as a way of looking back at the very fertile period in theoretical physics in the last quarter of the 20th century.
The note discusses the concept of meaningful, physical information presented by Carlo Rovelli. It points out certain consequences of the information model not elucidated in the original paper but important to its comprehensive…
It is commonly claimed that quantum mechanics makes reference to a microscopic realm constituted by elementary particles. However, as first famously noticed by Erwin Schr\"odinger, it is not at all clear what these quantum particles really…
The banquet for the July 2017 conference in Cambridge, UK celebrating Stephen Hawking's 75th birthday was held in Trinity College on July 3rd. The organizers asked the author, among others, to give a 10 minute after dinner talk on what it…
On September 25, 2014 Murray Gell-Mann was presented with the Helmholz Medal of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in a ceremony at the Santa Fe Institute. The author, among others, was asked to speak for fifteen…
What is the reason for a minor success of relational ideas in scientific and public society? Are they actually that weird as they seem at the first glance? Here we attempt to look with a fresh eye at the main relational principles…
We report on an unpublished and previously unknown manuscript of John von Neumann and contextualize it within the development of the theory of shock waves and detonations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Von Neumann studies…
The paper addresses the phenomenon of cross-cultural resonance, which arises when ideas coming from different cultures and view systems show mutual correlation, or coherence. We particularly dwell on the parallels between modern physics and…