物理学史与哲学

We advocate an account of dualities between physical theories: the basic idea is that dual theories are isomorphic representations of a common core. We defend and illustrate this account, which we call a Schema, in relation to symmetries.…

In this brief note I address the question not frequently asked, namely, why did it take two decades between Einstein's first proposal of photons and derivation of the full Planck formula from first principles of Statistical Mechanics,…

Modern attempts to understand light go back to Newton who considered light to be particles, the so called corpuscular theory, and the other school of Huygens, Young and others. Huygens and Young viewpoint emphasised the wave property. This…

What, if any, was Einstein's biggest mistake, the one most affecting our physics today? There is a perhaps apocryphal story, recounted by George Gamow, that he counted his cosmological constant as his biggest blunder. We now know his…

This year is the 100th birth anniversary of Richard Philips Feynman. This article commemorates his scientific contributions and lasting legacy.

Since I first became enthralled with physics as a teenager, I've been intrigued by the philosophical aspects of the discipline. As I approached the end of my career as an experimental physicist and observational astronomer (I'm now…

In this article, we discuss the idea of gravitational lensing, from a systematic, historical and didactic point of view. We show how the basic lensing equation together with the concepts of geometrical optics opens a space of implications…

One of the most complex architectural feats ever conceived is the magnificent temple of Jupiter at Baalbek, Lebanon. Several issues remain unsolved about this site, and in particular the chronology and dating of the two podia and the true…

During the period identified as the Rebirth of General Relativity, John Wheeler was instrumental in retrieving the physics of gravity that had become hidden behind the mathematical formalism. For Wheeler himself the change in point of view…

Finetuning and Naturalness are extra-empirical theory assessments that reflect our expectation how scientific theories should provide an intuitive understanding about the foundations underlying the observed phenomena. Recently, the absence…

We present the results obtained from the analysis of the precise spatial orientations of almost forty old colonial Christian churches located in the Arica and Parinacota region. This is an extended and difficult to travel area that received…

arXiv admin note: This submission has been withdrawn by arXiv administrators due to inflammatory content and unprofessional language

arXiv admin note: This submission has been withdrawn by arXiv administrators due to inflammatory content and unprofessional language

arXiv admin note: This submission has been withdrawn by arXiv administrators due to inflammatory content and unprofessional language

It is argued that the $x-y$ cancellation model (XYCM) is a good proxy for discussions of finetuned cancellations in physical theories. XYCM is then analyzed from a statistical perspective, where it is argued that a finetuned point in the…

In the history of quantum physics several no-go theorems have been proved, and many of them have played a central role in the development of the theory, such as Bell's or the Kochen-Specker theorem. A recent paper by F. Laudisa has raised…

Allan Sandage was an observational astronomer who was happiest at a telescope. On Hubble's sudden death Allan Sandage inherited the programmes using the world's largest optical telescope at Palomar to determine the distances and number…

Mounts and hills played a predominant role in all pre-Hispanic Andean cultures, especially for the Inca culture. Through the use of georeferenced orthophotography, we found that the Inca site, Ruinas de Chada, represents the origin of a…

Before the establishment of the hot Big Bang scenario as the modern paradigm of cosmology, it faced several early competitors : the so-called stationary cosmological models. There were truly plural and independent approaches incorporating…

The concept of the physical state of a system is ubiquitous in physics but is usually presented in terms of specific cases. For example, the state of a point particle of mass m is completely characterized by its position and momentum. There…