物理学史与哲学

"All men by nature desire to know," states Aristotle in the famous first sentence of his Metaphysics. Knowledge about fundamental particles and interactions, that is, knowledge about the deepest aspects of matter, is certainly high if not…

We discuss the first three particle colliders : AdA, VEP-1 and CBX

Symmetries have a crucial role in today's physics. In this thesis, we are mostly concerned with time reversal invariance (T-symmetry). A physical system is time reversal invariant if its underlying laws are not sensitive to the direction of…

The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the earliest work of L\'eon Rosenfeld, one of the pioneers in the search of Quantum Gravity, the supposed theory unifying quantum theory and general relativity. We describe how and why Rosenfeld…

The first part of this paper contains a brief description of the beginnings of modern cosmology, which, the author will argue, was most likely born in the Year 1912. Some of the pieces of evidence presented here have emerged from recent…

The celebrated quantum no-cloning theorem establishes the impossibility of making a perfect copy of an unknown quantum state. The discovery of this important theorem for the field of quantum information is currently dated 1982. I show here…

An introduction describing Walter Greiner's scientific life for the topical volume to be published by EPJA

A complete foundational discussion of acceleration in context of Special Relativity is presented. Acceleration allows the measurement of a Lorentz-FitzGerald body contraction created. It is argued that in the back scattering of a probing…

General relativity cannot be formulated as a perturbatively renormalizable quantum field theory. An argument relying on the validity of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy formula aims at dismissing gravity as non-renormalizable per se, against…

This paper addresses the question as to whether the methodology followed in building and assessing string theory can be considered scientific in the same sense, say, that the methodology followed in building and assessing the Standard Model…

In his 1606 De Stella Nova, Johannes Kepler attempted to answer Tycho Brahe's argument that the Copernican heliocentric hypothesis required all the fixed stars to dwarf the Sun, something Brahe found to be a great drawback of that…

The radical changes in the concepts and approach in Physics at the turn of the Nineteenth century were so deep, that is acknowledged as a revolution. However, in 1970 Thomas Kuhn's careful reconstruction of the researches on the black body…

This is an annotated translation from Latin of 'Principia pro motu sanguinis per arterias determinando' in which Euler develops the first known work on the mechanics of flows in elastic tubes, intended to the first contest of the Dijon…

Quantum mechanics predicts many surprising phenomena, including the two-slit interference of electrons. It has often been claimed that these phenomena cannot be understood in classical terms. But the meaning of "classical" is often not…

Classical mechanics, relativity, electrodynamics and quantum mechanics are often depicted as separate realms of physics, each with its own formalism and notion. This remains unsatisfactory with respect to the unity of nature and to the…

In metaphysics, there are a number of distinct but related questions about the existence of "further facts" -- facts that are contingent relative to the physical structure of the universe. These include further facts about qualia, personal…

This is a non-technical presentation (in historical context) of the quantum theory that is strictly based on global unitarity. While the first part was written for a general readership, Sect. 5 may appear a bit provocative. I argue that the…

According to what has become a standard history of quantum mechanics, in 1932 von Neumann persuaded the physics community that hidden variables are impossible as a matter of principle, after which leading proponents of the Copenhagen…

In his Autobiographical Notes, Einstein mentioned that on his road to the final theory of general relativity it was a major difficulty to accustom himself to the idea that coordinates need not possess an immediate physical meaning in terms…

In 1710, George Berkeley, philospher and scientist, discovered that the directions in which we see (sightlines) are tilted 45 degrees towards the past from the directions in which we look. Looking north from the 3-d present we see to the…