物理学史与哲学

The traveling-wave tube is a critical subsystem for satellite data transmission. Its role in the history of wireless communications and in the space conquest is significant, but largely ignored, even though the device remains widely used…

John Archibald Wheeler was a theoretical physicist who worked on both down-to-earth projects and highly speculative ideas, and always emphasized the importance of experiment and observation, even when speculating wildly. His research and…

This is the memoir of Brian Dennis - his life story to date, and his involvement with high energy solar physics.

This article, the second in a series about the Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765), traces his education from his arrival in Moscow in 1731 to study at the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, through his admission to the St. Petersburg…

This paper retraces the 24 years starting with the appearance of the symbol "$\nu_{\tau}$" in 1977, until the observation of tau neutrino interactions with matter in 2000. The fact that the neutral particle present in tau decays was a…

According to the received view Feynman diagrams are a bookkeeping device in complex perturbative calculations. Thus, they do not provide a representation or model of the underlying physical process. This view is in apparent tension with…

This work shows that, Newton's Proposition 1 in the {\it Principia}, is an {\it exact} graphical representation of a canonical transformation, a first-order symplectic integrator generated at a finite time-step by the Hamiltonian. A…

This short review is dedicated to academician Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich, the science of his epoch and the creation of modern accretion theory.

We show how G\"odel's first incompleteness theorem has an analog in quantum theory. G\"odel's theorem implies endless opportunities for appending axioms to arithmetic, implicitly showing a role for an agent, namely an agent that asserts an…

Experimental evidene of the last decades has made the status of "collapses of the wave function" even more shaky than it already was on conceptual grounds: interference effects turn out to be detectable even when collapses are typically…

A concise story of the rise of the four fermion theory of the universal weak interaction and its experimental confirmation, with a special emphasis on the problems related to parity violation.

Based on historical facts, revisited from a present-day perspective, and on the documented opinions of the scientists involved in the discovery themselves, strong arguments are given in favor of a proposal to include prominent astronomer…

My aim in this paper is twofold: (i) to distinguish two notions of naturalness employed in BSM physics and (ii) to argue that recognizing this distinction has methodological consequences. One notion of naturalness is an "autonomy of scales"…

String theory has not even come close to a complete formulation after half a century of intense research. On the other hand, a number of features of the theory suggest that the theory, once completed, may be a final theory. It is argued in…

Modern scientific cosmology pushes the boundaries of knowledge and the knowable. This is prompting questions on the nature of scientific knowledge. A central issue is what defines a 'good' model. When addressing global properties of the…

A biographical profile of the theoretical physicist, Julian Schwinger, and a discussion of "The Memories of Julian" Centennial Celebration (held at Harvard University on February 12, 2018) is presented herein.

The main topic of long-term researches by G.A. Shajn is the nature of diffuse matter, its distribu-tion in the Galaxy and extragalactic systems, interaction with the interstellar medium and hot stars, the formation of emission and…

This paper argues for the following three theses: (1) There is a clear reason to prefer physical theories with deterministic dynamical equations: such theories are maximally rich in information and usually also maximally simple. (2) There…

We present the theory of special relativity here through the lens of differential geometry. In particular, we explicitly avoid any reference to hypotheses of the form "The laws of physics take the same form in all inertial reference frames"…

It is argued that the occurrence of disproportionately ("un-natural") large (or small) numbers, as well as deep cancellations, are comparatively natural traits of the way Nature is geared to operate in most complex systems. The idea is…