物理学史与哲学

We present a centennial review of the history of the term known as the cosmological constant. First introduced to the general theory of relativity by Einstein in 1917 in order to describe a universe that was assumed to be static, the term…

There are well-known problems associated with the idea of (local) gravitational energy in general relativity. We offer a new perspective on those problems by comparison with Newtonian gravitation, and particularly geometrized Newtonian…

Robert Stirling's patent for what was essentially a new type of engine to create work from heat was submitted in 1816. Its reception was underwhelming and although the idea was sporadically developed, it was eclipsed by the steam engine…

From the late 1920s to the early 1950s, cosmic rays were the main instrument to investigate what we now call "high-energy physics". In approximately 25 years, an intense experimental and theoretical work brought particle physics from its…

This paper is written in honour of the centenary of Emmy Amalie Noether's famous article entitled Invariante Variationsprobleme. It firstly aims to give an exposition of what we believe to be the most significant and elegant issues…

Kepler's laws are derived from the inverse square law without the use of calculus and are simplified over previous such derivations.

The hard problem in consciousness is the problem of understanding how physical processes in the brain could give rise to subjective conscious experience. In this paper, I suggest that in order to understand the relationship between…

Research in quantum gravity strongly suggests that our world in not fundamentally spatiotemporal, but that spacetime may only emerge in some sense from a non-spatiotemporal structure, as this paper illustrates in the case of causal set…

When guns were developed in Europe in the 14th century, the theory of projectile motion was not the one we are familiar with today due to Galileo and Newton but the one taught by Aristotle approximately 1700 years earlier. In addition to…

This paper presents a minimal formulation of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, by which is meant a formulation which describes the theory in a succinct, self-contained, clear, unambiguous and of course correct manner. The bulk of the…

Science is a constructed narrative of the natural world based on information gathering and its subsequent analysis. In this essay, we develop a novel approach to the epistemic foundations of the scientific narrative, as based on our…

This volume covers one of the most thrilling two-year periods in twentieth-century physics, as matrix mechanics - developed chiefly by W. Heisenberg, M. Born, and P. Jordan - and wave mechanics - developed by E. Schr\"odinger - supplanted…

The sixteen years old Albert Einstein made friend with Ernestina Marangoni in the summer of 1895 in Pavia. We discuss in this article the unacknowledged link between Albert Einstein and the physicist and professor Carlo Marangoni,…

After a historical and cultural overview of the "Indian republic", the Andean religiosity and the churches of the highlands of Arica, we detail our archaeoastronomical studies on the orientations of the Andean Christian churches in the…

This essay demonstrates the key role of Astronomy in Botticelli's "Venus and Mars-NG915" painting, to date only very partially understood. Worthwhile coincidences among the principles of the Ficinian philosophy, the historical characters…

According to Schopenhauer, Kant's arguments about the transcendental ideality of space and time can be extended to matter through the concept of causality and the principle of sufficient reason. In this article, I examine to what extent…

Independent of Maxwell, in 1867 the Danish physicist L. V. Lorenz proposed a theory in which he identified light with electrical oscillations propagating in a very poor conductor. Lorenz's electrodynamic theory of light, which formally was…

Introduction to the special issue of Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 376, 2018, `Hilbert's Sixth Problem'. The essence of the Sixth Problem is discussed and the content of this issue is introduced. In 1900, David Hilbert presented 23 problems for…

Based on palaeoenvironmental, historical and archaeological data, the paper proposes possible climatic impacts on the history of the Avar Khaganate, which comprised the Carpathian Basin between the late 6th and the early 9th century AD.…

Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn (1851-1922) presented a model for the distribution of stars in space together with a dynamical interpretation in terms of an equilibrium between the gravitational field of the stars and their random motion and…