物理学史与哲学

This is an invited review of Jean Bricmont's book "Making Sense of Quantum Mechanics."

First ideas of neutrino masses, mixing and oscillations proposed by Bruno Pontecorvo in 1957 and later development of these ideas are considered in some details. Original ideas of the two-neutrino mixing proposed by Maki, Nakagawa and…

This is an annotated translation from Latin of "Experimenta coram societate instituta in confirmationem theoriae pressionum quas latera canalis ab aqua tranfluente sustinet" in which Daniel Bernoulli describes six experiments conducted…

In earlier centuries kings and governments employed astrologists to help them take the best decisions. Present-day governments no longer employ astrologists but still have no clear analytical tool to replace them. Over the past two decades…

In 1614 Johann Georg Locher, a student of the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner, proposed a physical mechanism to explain how the Earth could orbit the sun. An orbit, Locher said, is a perpetual fall. He proposed this despite the fact…

Analogous to G\"odel's incompleteness theorems is a theorem in physics to the effect that the set of explanations of given evidence is uncountably infinite. An implication of this theorem is that contact between theory and experiment…

It is shown that a notion of natural place is possible within modern physics. For Aristotle, the elements$-$the primary components of the world$-$follow to their natural places in the absence of forces. On the other hand, in general…

We address the phenomenon of reflection in concave spherical mirror in two contrasting approaches to optics. In his Optics (ca.165) Ptolemy applied the cathetus principle as a regulative means for explaining qualitatively effects related to…

This is a review of Hossenfelder's book, 'Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray'. The book gives a breezy exposition of the present situation in fundamental physics, and raises important questions: both about the content of the…

One of the most important philosophers in history, the German Friedrich Nietzsche, is almost ignored by physicists. This author who declared the death of God in the 19th century was a science enthusiast, especially in the second period of…

Although general relativity is a predictively successful theory, it treats matter as classical rather than as quantum. For this reason, it will have to be replaced by a more fundamental quantum theory of gravity. Attempts to formulate a…

This is a brief introduction to the life and ideas of the Lithuanian-German physicist, philosopher and religious thinker Max B. Weinstein, who is today best known for his thoughts concerning so-called pandeism. An accomplished theoretical…

As in Greek mythology, the neutrino was born in the mind of Wolfgang Pauli to salvage a fundamental principle. Its existence met with universal skepticism by a scientific community used to infer particles from experiment. Its detection in…

A verse in book I of Rigveda mentions a cosmic tree with rope-like aerial roots held up in the sky. Such an imagery might have ensued from the appearance of a comet having `tree stem' like tail, with branched out portions resembling aerial…

Quantum mechanics appears to contain ghosts from both classical statistical mechanics and special relativity. On one hand, both the Dirac and Schr\"{o}dinger equations have classical analogs that emerge directly from classical statistical…

Pions were predicted by H. Yukawa as force carriers of the inter-nucleon forces, and were detected in 1947. Today they are known to be bound states of quarks and anti-quarks of the two lightest flavours. They satisfy Bose statistics, and…

The paper investigates the kind of dependence relation that best portrays Machian frame-dragging in general relativity. The question is tricky because frame-dragging relates local inertial frames to distant distributions of matter in a…

The essay presents the results of a joint study of astronomy and archeology that has allowed to define the foundation date of the city of Turin as a Roman colony, called Iulia Augusta Taurinorum. This multidisciplinary research represents a…

Gauge symmetries are often highlighted as a fundamental cornerstone of modern physics. But at the same time, it is commonly emphasized that gauge symmetries are not a fundamental feature of nature but merely redundancies in our description.…

The Higgs naturalness principle served as the basis for the so far failed prediction that signatures of physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) would be discovered at the LHC. One influential formulation of the principle, which prohibits…