物理学史与哲学
The renaissance of General Relativity witnessed considerable progress regarding both understanding and justifying Einstein's equations. Both general relativists and historians of the subject tend to share a view, General Relativity…
The conservation of energy and momentum have been viewed as undermining Cartesian mental causation since the 1690s. Modern discussions of the topic tend to use mid-19th century physics, neglecting both locality and Noether's theorem and its…
This essay concerns the study of gravitation and general relativity at King's College London (KCL). It covers developments since the nineteenth century but its main focus is on the quarter of a century beginning in 1955. At King's research…
Kantian philosophy of space, time and gravity is significantly affected in three ways by particle physics. First, particle physics deflects Schlick's General Relativity-based critique of synthetic a priori knowledge. Schlick argued that…
An overlap between the general relativist and particle physicist views of Einstein gravity is uncovered. Noether's 1918 paper developed Hilbert's and Klein's reflections on the conservation laws. Energy-momentum is just a term proportional…
I summarize, at its 41st--and what would have been Bruno's 94th--birthday, the history of the discoveries of Supergravity and some of its structure and later developments.
This article explores the following methodological principle for theory construction in physics: if an ontological theory predicts two scenarios that are ontologically distinct but empirically indiscernible, then this theory should be…
Wigner's friend is commonly invoked in discussion of quantum mechanics and its interpretation.. but who is the friend really? The publishing context of Wigner's article is not widely appreciated. A recent paper by Ballentine is relevant.
The scientific career of Uruguayan theoretical physicist Enrique Loedel Palumbo in Argentina illustrates the intense intellectual exchange that existed between these neighboring countries in the first third of the twentieth century. In this…
A discussion of Christopher Wren's inaugural address of 1657, and how it came to be widely misquoted so as to appear to be referring to the future discovery of exoplanets instead of contemporary discoveries in the solar system.
This paper argues that the physics of condensed matter cannot be fully reduced to the supposedly fundamental quantum mechanical theory for all the atoms of which the system consists. In fact, there are many reasons to reject the idea that…
Marcello Cresti graduated in Physics in 1950 at the University of Pisa by attending the Scuola Normale Superiore; he became professor of Experimental Physics in Padua in 1965, and then Rector of the University of Padua in 1984. His research…
An infinite number of elastically colliding balls is considered in a classical, and then in a relativistic setting. Energy and momentum are not necessarily conserved globally, even though each collision does separately conserve them. This…
An actual infinity of colliding balls can be in a configuration in which the laws of mechanics lead to logical inconsistency. It is argued that one should therefore limit the domain of these laws to a finite, or only a potentially infinite…
On the basis of what I call physico-formalist philosophy of mathematics, I will develop an amended account of the Kantian--Reichenbachian conception of constitutive a priori. It will be shown that the features (attributes, qualities,…
According to popular tradition, the Canarian city of San Cristobal de La Laguna, a World Heritage Site by UNESCO since 1999, emerged in the early sixteenth century with a novel organization, in line with a new peaceful social order inspired…
In glaring contrast to its indisputable century-old experimental success, the ultimate objects and meaning of quantum physics remain a matter of vigorous debate among physicists and philosophers of science. This article attempts to shed new…
In this paper we have two aims: first, to draw attention to the close connexion between interpretation and scientific understanding; second, to give a detailed account of how theories without a spacetime can be interpreted, and so of how…
This work reviews the origin, development, completion, and outcome of a trans-elastic ultracentrifuge project of Mexico's Nuclear Center through 1971 to 1986. The project had its origin in the search for an effect that supposedly would…
Active diffeomorphisms map a differentiable manifold to itself. They transform manifold points and objects without changing the system of local coordinates used to represent those objects. What has been called Leibniz Equivalence is the…