物理学史与哲学

There exists a growing literature on the so-called physical Church-Turing thesis in a relativistic spacetime setting. The physical Church-Turing thesis is the conjecture that no computing device that is physically realizable (even in…

Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960) was both an influential Marxist and an innovative astronomer. This paper will analyse the various innovative methods that he developed to represent the visual aspect of the Milky Way and the statistical…

Since Stephen Hawking's original 1975 paper on black hole evaporation, there has been a consensus that the problem of "loss of information" is both deep and troubling. It is also thought that resolution of the problem may hold some…

The recently published Yemeni observing report about SN 1006 from al-Yamani clearly gives AD 1006 Apr $17 \pm 2$ (mid-Rajab 396h) as first observation date. Since this is about 1.5 weeks earlier than the otherwise earliest reports (Apr 28…

One of main events on Rapanui before the cruel war (several wars) between the Hanau Momoko and Hanau Eepe was the annual election of the bird-man. Plainly, the local priest-astronomers, the descendants of immigrants from the Andean region…

Around year 2000 the centenary of Planck's thermal radiation formula awakened interest in the origins of quantum theory, traditionally traced back to the Planck's conference on 14 December 1900 at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. A lot of…

A covariant relativistic formalism for the electron-photon and nuclear dynamics is summarised making more accurate predictions in agreement with experiments for Compton scattering in shells with large electron binding energy. An exact…

This is the first part of an oral history interview on the lifelong involvement of Joel Lebowitz in the development of statistical mechanics. Here the covered topics include the formative years, which overlapped the tragic period of Nazi…

A translation of Paul Ehrenfest's 1933 paper, entitled "Phase transitions in the usual and generalized sense, classified according to the singularities of the thermodynamic potential" is presented. Some historical commentary about the…

The paper "On the theory of storm" (Zur Sturmtheorie) is the last one Max Margules has published in 1906, just before to "bid farewell to Meteorology" (using his words). The lack of English translation of this paper might be filled by this…

In the late 1620s the Neapolitan telescope maker Francesco Fontana was the first to observe the sky using a telescope with two convex lenses, which he had manufactured himself. Fontana succeeded in drawing the most accurate maps of the…

Galileo's support to the Copernican theory was decisive for the revolutionary astronomical discoveries he achieved in 1610. We trace the origins of Galileo's conversion to the Copernican theory, discussing in particular the "Dialogo de…

This paper proposes a new definition of science based on the distinction between the activity of scientists and the product of that activity: the former is denoted (lower-case) science and the latter (upper-case) Science. These definitions…

Before the discovery of the expanding universe, one of the challenges faced in early relativistic cosmology was the determination of the finite and constant curvature radius of space-time by using astronomical observations. Great interest…

The article analysis was carried out within the confines of the replication project of the telescope, which was used by Mikhail Lomonosov at observation the transit of Venus in 1761. At that time he discovered the Venusian atmosphere. It is…

Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…

In the free case, it is possible to define quantum fields which describe particles with integer or half-integer spin larger than one. It is shown that particles with integer spin must have Bose statistic and particles with half-integer-spin…

"Let us call the novel quantities which, in addition to the vectors and tensors, have appeared in the quantum mechanics of the spinning electron, and which in the case of the Lorentz group are quite differently transformed from tensors, as…

In this contribution I discuss a peak in Einstein's endeavor to extract as much information as possible about the nature of radiation from the Planck distribution is his paper "On the Quantum Theory of Radiation" of 1916. This is one of the…

Scientific illustrations, thanks to the vision of great artists fascinated by astronomical research and astronautics, have provided us with an accurate depiction of the possible views which mankind will one day observed from locations other…