物理学史与哲学

On 1 September 1859, the British astronomer Richard Carrington observed an anomalous behavior on the Sun. Approximately 17 hours later, magnetic effects of global scales were observed at Earth: aurora borealis and australis in low-latitude…

The current debate about a possible change of paradigm from a single universe to a multiverse scenario could have deep implications on our view of cosmology and of science in general. These implications therefore deserve to be analyzed from…

We discuss a previously unpublished description of electromagnetism outlined by Richard P. Feynman in the 1960s in five handwritten pages, recently uncovered among his papers, and partly developed in later lectures. Though similar to the…

This paper bridges a historiographical gap in accounts of the prediction and discovery of the positron by combining three ingredients. First, the prediction and discovery of the positron are situated in the broader context of a period of…

Supergravity is a remarkable theory combining supersymmetry and general relativity. While the theory has many developers from across the globe, we wish to address the question who were the real originators of this fantastic idea.

The paper discusses from a metaphysical standpoint the nature of the dependence relation underpinning the talk of mutual action between material and spatiotemporal structures in general relativity. It is shown that the standard analyses of…

Rather than offering chronologically ordered encyclopedic knowledge of a lifetime, only some of the most striking events of the existence of this well-known scientist are here pointed out. Sections: Life; Man of laws; Interest in…

Despite the success of our best models in Theoretical Physics, especially concerning Cosmology and Particle Physics, we still face persistent challenges. Among them we have the cosmological singularity problem, understanding the late-time…

The fact that no evidence of new physics was found so far by LHC experiments has led some to call for the abandonment of the naturalness criterion. Others, on the contrary, have felt the need to break a lance in its defense by claiming that…

Although the wish to unify theories into something more fundamental is omnipresent and compelling, nonetheless, in a sense, theories must first be unifiable. The reasons for the success of the unification of electricity and magnetism into a…

This paper introduces and defends an account of model-based science that I dub model pluralism. I argue that despite a growing awareness in the philosophy of science literature of the multiplicity, diversity, and richness of models and…

The principle of energy conservation is widely taken to be a serious difficulty for interactionist dualism (whether property or substance). Interactionists often have therefore tried to make it satisfy energy conservation. This paper…

Historians recently rehabilitated Einstein's "physical strategy" for General Relativity (GR). Independently, particle physicists similarly re-derived Einstein's equations for a massless spin 2 field. But why not a light \emph{massive} spin…

In 1717 Halley compared contemporaneous measurements of the latitudes of four stars with earlier measurements by ancient Greek astronomers and by Brahe, and from the differences concluded that these four stars showed proper motion. An…

The problematic relationship between science and philosophy has, since the beginning of modernity, divided the world into two separate domains: nature and human. Some of today's schools of philosophy and epistemological inquiry have…

Unveiling numerical trends among either atomic or equivalent weights that somehow preserved resemblances among elements was frequent in the 1860s. Standing out from the crowd, Meyer and Mendeleev went beyond numerical relationships,…

This paper consists of a translation of Andre Tacquet's discussion of the question of sizes of stars in a heliocentric universe, as published in his posthumous Opera Mathematica of 1668, along with introductory material and analysis. While…

These notes are written for the book "From the past to the future: the legacy of Lev Lipatov", editors: Jochen Bartels et all, which will be published by WS. I tried to share with you the atmosphere and the flavour of everyday life in…

In this paper, I consider the issue of how two mathematical models of modern physics, the variational principles and the quantum path integral formalism, relate to reality. I assume that the observed phenomena are consistent with the…

Some interpretations of quantum mechanics use notions of possible states and possible trajectories. I investigate how this modal approach correlates with several metaphysical conceptions of a transition from potential to actual existence.…