物理学史与哲学

The placement of the Middle Bronze Age settlement Villaggio dei Faraglioni on the Ustica island, one of the best preserved prehistoric village of the Mediterranean area, is analyzed from a cognitive point of view, taking into account…

The issue of the orientation of Greek Temples has been the subject of several debates since the end of the 19 century. In fact, although a general tendency to orientation within the arc of the rising sun is undeniable, specific patterns and…

The Domus Aurea, Nero's last "palace" constructed in the very heart of ancient Rome, is a true masterpiece of Roman architecture. We explore here symbolic aspects of the emperor's project, analysing the archaeoastronomy of the best…

I present the reconstruction of the involvement of Karl Popper in the community of physicists concerned with foundations of quantum mechanics, in the 1980s. At that time Popper gave active contribution to the research in physics, of which…

In 1877 James Clerk Maxwell and his student Donald MacAlister refined Henry Cavendish's 1773 null experiment demonstrating the absence of electricity inside a charged conductor. This null result was a mathematical prediction of the inverse…

The Giornata Sesta about the Force of Percussion is a relatively less known Chapter from the Galileo's masterpiece "Discourse about Two New Sciences". It was first published lately (1718), long after the first edition of the Two New…

Within the Ontological Models Framework (OMF), Pusey, Barrett, and Rudolph (PBR) have given an argument by which they claimed that the epistemic view on the wavefunction should be ruled out. This study highlights an incorrect conclusion in…

From a modern perspective cosmology is a historical science in so far that it deals with the development of the universe since its origin some 14 billion years ago. The origin itself may not be subject to scientific analysis and…

We present some aspects of the work and personality of Halton Christian Arp (1927-2013).

In May of 1935, Einstein published with two co-authors the famous EPR-paper about entangled particles, which questioned the completeness of Quantum Mechanics by means of a gedankenexperiment. Only one month later, he published a work that…

Edwin Powel Hubble is regarded as one of the most important astronomers of 20th century. In despite of his great contributions to the field of astronomy, he never received the Nobel Prize because astronomy was not considered as the field of…

We reflect on the nature, role and limits of non-empirical theory assessment in fundamental physics, focusing in particular on quantum gravity. We argue for the usefulness and, to some extent, necessity of non-empirical theory assessment,…

We study the Johansen-Ledoit-Sornette (JLS) model of financial market crashes (Johansen, Ledoit, and Sornette [2000] "Crashes as Critical Points." Int. J. Theor. Appl. Finan. 3(2) 219-255). On our view, the JLS model is a curious case from…

A slightly(!!!) philosophical article which looks at some interesting overlaps between some fine mathematical brains and a celestial mechanics legend from Japan.

We historically trace various non-conventional explanations for the origin of the cosmic microwave background and discuss their merit, while analyzing the dynamics of their rejection, as well as the relevant physical and methodological…

Since the mid-1920s, different strands of research used stars as "physics laboratories" for investigating the nature of matter under extreme densities and pressures, impossible to realize on Earth. To trace this process this paper is…

The guiding influence of some of Stanley Mandelstam's key contributions to the development of theoretical high energy physics is discussed, from the motivation for the study of the analytic properties of the scattering matrix through to…

Spacetime as we know and love it is lost in most approaches to quantum gravity. For many of these approaches, as inchoate and incomplete as they may be, one of the main challenges is to relate what they take to be the fundamental…

Radical ontic structural realism (ROSR) asserts an ontological commitment to 'free-standing' physical structures understood solely in terms of fundamental relations, without any recourse to relata which stand in these relations. Bain (2011)…

There has been a recent spate of essays defending presentism, the view in the metaphysics of time according to which all and only present events or entities exist. What is particularly striking about this resurgence is that it takes place…