物理学史与哲学

The question of the existence of gravitational stress-energy in general relativity has exercised investigators in the field since the inception of the theory. Folklore has it that no adequate definition of a localized gravitational…

There are many theories that have resided these last fifty years within the hazy mist we have been calling the Standard Model (SM) of elementary particles. An attempt is made here to construct a coherent description of the SM today, because…

We describe how the first direct observation of electron-positron collisions took place in 1963-1964 at the Laboratoire de l'Acc\'el\'erateur Lin\'eaire d'Orsay, in France, with the storage ring AdA, which had been proposed and constructed…

The analysis of theory-confirmation generally takes the deductive form: show that a theory in conjunction with physical data and auxiliary hypotheses yield a prediction about phenomena; verify the prediction; provide a quantitative measure…

The leading account of several salient observable features of our universe today is provided by the theory of cosmic inflation. But an important and thus far intractable question is whether inflation is generic, or whether it is finely…

Paul A. M. Dirac has been undoubtedly one of the central figures of the last century physics, contributing in several and remarkable ways to the development of Quantum Mechanics (QM); he was also at the centre of an active community of…

In February 1978 Julian Schwinger's 60th birthday was celebrated with a SchwingerFest at UCLA. This article consists of transcripts of historical talks given there.

In the early 1980s, Schwinger made seminal contributions to the semiclassical theory of atoms. There had, of course, been earlier attempts at improving upon the Thomas--Fermi model of the 1920s. Yet, a consistent derivation of the leading…

Einstein's own demonstration of time dilation taken from his book with L. Infeld (1938) is analyzed. His ingenious circumnavigation of an apparent discrepancy between clock synchronisation and Lorentz transformation is discussed.

For the celebrations of the 100 years of the observations undertaken by Eddington at the island of Principe and collaborators at Sobral during a total solar eclipse in May 29, 1919, which have confirmed Einstein's theory of general…

The chain of late Roman fortified settlements built in the Kharga Oasis, in Egypt Western Desert, represents an interesting case study to analyse how the ancient Roman town planners interacted with the landscape. A peculiar feature of the…

This paper develops a number of quantum mechanical characterisations of Stern-Gerlach. It discusses areas of vagueness in their formulation. Philosophers criticise quantum mechanics for unacceptable vagueness in connection with the…

Effective Field Theories have been used successfully to provide a "bottom-up" description of phenomena whose intrinsic degrees of freedom behave at length scales far different from their effective degrees of freedom. An example is the…

The theoretical motivations that led Tullio Regge to investigate the analytical properties of the scattering amplitude of the collision process between two particles in terms of complex energy and complex angular momentum are briefly…

The royal Chinese mausoleums of the Tang, Ming and Qing Chinese dynasties are astounding ensables of monuments, conceived and built to assure to the Emperors immortality in the afterlife and perennial fame on earth. To this aim, a series of…

I review aspects of Michael Atiyah's research in fundamental theoretical physics during the last ten years of his life, and contrast his deliberate interest in physics during this period with the inadvertent impact on physics of his early…

The relationship according to which one physical theory encompasses the domain of empirical validity of another is widely known as "reduction." Here it is argued that one popular methodology for showing that one theory reduces to another,…

Bruno Touschek was an Austrian born theoretical physicist, who proposed and built the first electron-positron collider in 1960 in the Frascati National Laboratories in Italy. In this note we reconstruct a crucial period of Bruno Touschek's…

This paper evaluates some important aspects of the multiverse concept. Firstly, the most realistic opportunity for it which is the spacetime variability of the physical constants and may deliver worlds with different physics, hopefully…

After the development of a self-consistent quantum formalism nearly a century ago, there ensued a quest to understand the often counterintuitive predictions of the theory. These endeavors invariably begin with the assumption of the "truth"…