All posts under category "Physics / Physics.hist-Ph"
The quantum logical and quantum information-theoretic traditions have exerted an especially powerful influence on Bub's thinking about the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics. This paper discusses both the quantum logical and information-theoretic traditions from the point of view of their r
We present the analysis of the measured orientations of 30 churches of the island of Lanzarote, in the Canarian archipelago, built prior to 1810, as well as a few buildings of later times, which represent a nearly complete sample of all the island's Christian sanctuaries. Our study indicates that a
Since the dawn of telescopic astronomy astronomers have observed and measured the 'spurious' telescopic disks of stars, generally reporting that brighter stars have larger disks than fainter stars. Early observers such as Galileo Galilei interpreted these disks as being the physical bodies of stars;
From the customary view the Michelson-Morley experiment is used to expose the failure of the aether theory. The key point in this experiment is the emph{fringe shift} of the interference pattern. Regularly, the fringe shift calculations are only presented from the perspective of the inertial frame w
Wolfgang Pauli's philosophy and physics were intertwined. His philosophy was a variety of Platonism, in which Pauli's affiliation with Carl Jung formed an integral part, but Pauli's philosophical explorations in physics appeared before he met Jung. Jung validated Pauli's psycho-philosophical perspec
Pope Clement XI (1700-1721) ordered Francesco Bianchini (1662-1729) to build a Meridian Line. Bianchini was the Secretary of the Commission for the Calendar. He chose the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli because of the stability of its roman walls and foundations and its suitable dimension. Stab
We examine the claim made by Hara et al. in 1969 of the observation of a 10^19 eV cosmic ray extensive air shower using the air fluorescence technique. We find that it is likely that fluorescence light was observed, confirming this as the first such observation. The work of Hara et al. and their fri
The myth that the expansion of the Universe was discovered by Hubble was first propagated by Humason (1931). The true nature of this discovery turns out to have been both more complex and more interesting.
Work of Lev Landau had a profound impact on the physics in 20th century. Landau had created the paradigms that had framed the conversations on the outstanding problems in physics for decades. He has laid the foundations for our understanding of quantum matter such as superfluidity, superconductivity
The Mayan culture collected exquisite astronomical data for over a millennium. However, it failed to come up with the breakthrough ideas of modern astronomy because the data was analyzed within a mythological culture of astrology that rested upon false but mathematically sophisticated theories about
Masses and mixings of quarks and leptons differ wildly from one another. Thus it is all the more challenging to search for some hidden attribute that they may share.
One additional position of the famous Mataveri calendar of Easter Island has been interpreted. New data on the watchings of Venus and Aldebaran have been rendered. Some reports about the sun, the moon as well as Sirius are of our interest, too.
The XXXI European Symposium on Occultation Projects will be celebrated in ICRANet center of Pescara from 24 to 27 August 2012 (www.icranet.org/clavius2012). The occasion is the fourth centennial of the Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius (Bamberg 1538- Napoli 1612). The hybrid eclipse witnessed by
Priority in the discovery of the velocity-distance relationship may be shifting from Edwin Hubble to Georges Lemaitre, but any reassessment of credit must also consider the contributions of Vesto Slipher. Not only were his spiral galaxy redshifts a necessary component in all of the original velocity
Johannes Hevelius's 1662 Mercurius in Sole Visus Gedani contains a table of magnitudes and apparent telescopic diameters of nineteen stars. The data conform to a simple model, suggesting that Hevelius produced what is essentially a table of surprisingly precise photometric data.
NASA's Kepler Mission revolutionized exoplanet science in the early part of the 2010's. Looking back from the perspective of the end of that decade, Kepler appears to have burst upon the scene ready for battle, like Athena springing forth, fully formed, from the head of Zeus. The story was not so si
The emergence of Boris Struminsky's January, 1965 paper with a footnote that introduced a new quark quantum number now known as color caused a response [arXiv:0908.2772] that is seen, perhaps contrary to what it was intended to convey, to corroborate the general picture that comes out of the evidenc
Through detection by low gravitational wave space interferometers, the capture of stars by supermassive black holes will constitute a giant step forward in the understanding of gravitation in strong field. The impact of the perturbations on the motion of the star is computed via the tail, the back-s
In Dantean cosmography the Universe is described as a series of concentric spheres with all the known planets embedded in their rotation motion, the Earth located at the centre and Lucifer at the centre of the Earth. Beyond these 'celestial spheres', Dante represents the 'angelic choirs' as other ni
This part of the talk aims to present briefly the biodata and the exceptional career of Paco Yndurain who left us suddenly in June 2008. The scientific part: Light Scalar Mesons in QCD is published in the proceedings of QCD 08 (Montpellier 7-12th july 2008: arXiv:0811.0563 [hep-ph]).
In December 1924 Wolfgang Pauli proposed the idea of an inner degree of freedom of the electron, which he insisted should be thought of as genuinely quantum mechanical in nature. Shortly thereafter Ralph Kronig and, independently, Samuel Goudsmit and George Uhlenbeck took up a less radical stance by
This article, in English, represents part of the invited talk delivered by the author at the 'Internat.Conf.Majorana Legacy and Phys. XXI century' held at Dep. of Phys.,University of Catania, Italy, in Oct.2006: Conference organized for celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth (in Catania) of
Wherever old Universities exist [in Europe, for example: Italy being not the last one], there can be found Scientific Instruments of Historical Interest, e.g., for Physics -which is the case we are concerned with here;- even if proper attention has been paid to such an exceptional heritage only duri
According to popular tradition, the Canarian city of San Cristobal de La Laguna, a World Heritage Site by UNESCO since 1999, emerged in the early sixteenth century with a novel organization, in line with a new peaceful social order inspired by the religious doctrine of the millennium and its express
We review the current standard model for the evolution of the Universe from an early inflationary epoch to the complex hierarchy of structure seen today. We summarize and provide key references for the following topics: observations of the expanding Universe; the hot early Universe and nucleosynthes
Towards the end of the 19th century, Kelvin pronounced as the 'clouds of physics' 1) the failure of the Michelson-Morely experiment to detect an ether wind, 2) the violation of the classical mechanical equipartition theorem in statistical thermodynamics. And he believed that the removal of these clo
The absence of any tendency toward rotation in a moving right angle lever is given a simple explanation.
By assuming that a particle of energy hbar.omega is actually a dissipative system maintained in a nonequilibrium steady state by a constant throughput of energy (heat flow), the exact Schroedinger equation is derived, both for conservative and nonconservative systems. Thereby, only universal propert
Thought experiment is an apparition in a modern Science, which is in last 100 Years took sweep. Work is based at the aspect of Physics, because and the writer is from Physics. Manners to study thought experiments are multiple, and this work is only one aspect in that complex of feasibility. About re
An attempt to redefine science in the 21st century (BK Jennings, On the Nature of Science, Physics in Canada, 63(7) 2007) has abandoned traditional notions of natural law and objective reality, blurred the distinctions between natural science and natural history, elevated Occam's razor from an epist
In this paper we revise the main aspects of the Hamiltonian analogy: the fact that optical paths are completely analogous to mechanical trajectories. We follow Schr'{o}dinger's original idea and go beyond this analogy by changing over from the Hamilton's principal function $S$ to the wave function $
Galileo determined distances to stars based on the assumption that stars were suns, the apparent sizes of stars as seen through his telescope, and basic geometry. However, the apparent sizes that he measured were the result of diffraction and not related to the actual sizes of the stars. Galileo's m
Paradoxes are a very frequent phenomenon in processes of thought which strive towards the intelectual and cognitive shifts. They occur in all areas of human spiritual activites. What we are interested here in, are the paradoxes in physics. We will try to give the answers to the questions such as: Wh
We created and analyzed a citation history of papers covering measurements of Newtons constant of gravity from 1686 to 2016. Interest concerning the true value of the gravitational constant was most intense in the late 90s to early 2000s and is gaining traction again in the present. Another network
It is commonly believed that the ancient Romans were the first to create and use concrete. This is not true, as we can easily learn from the Latin literature itself. For sure, Romans were able to prepare high-quality hydraulic cements, comparable with the modern Portland cements. In this paper, we w
Cramer's (1986) transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics posits retrocausal influences in quantum processes in an attempt to alleviate some of the interpretational difficulties of the Copenhagen interpretation. In response to Cramer's theory, Maudlin (2002) has levelled a significant object
There are relatively few antique photographs of the Sun compared to drawings of the solar disc. We want to highlight three solar photographs taken by Giorgio Roster in 1893. Roster (1843-1894) was a doctor, chemist, and photographer. The library of the Museo di storia della scienza of Florence prese
Poincar'e held the view that geometry is a convention and cannot be tested experimentally. This position was apparently refuted by the general theory of relativity and the successful confirmation of its predictions; unfortunately, Poincar'e did not live to defend his thesis. In this paper, I argue t
Observational cosmology of the first decades of the Twentieth Century was dominated by two giants: Edwin Hubble and Harlow Shapley. Hubble's major contributions were to the study and classification of individual galaxies with large telescopes, whereas Shapley is best remembered for his work on group
From an anthropological point of view, the whole concept of a 'path of progress' in astronomical discovery is anathema, since it implicitly downgrades other cultural perspectives, such as the many 'indigenous cosmologies' that still exist in the modern world. By doing so, one risks provoking those w
It is not very well known that the philosopher Karl Popper has been one of the foremost critics of the orthodox interpretation of quantum physics for about six decades. This paper reconstructs in detail most of Popper's activities on foundations of quantum mechanics (FQM) in the period of 1950s and
A demonic being, introduced by Maxwell, to miraculously create thermal non-equilibrium and violate the Second law of thermodynamics, has been among the most intriguing and elusive wishful concepts for over 150 years. Maxwell and his followers focused on 'effortless gating' a molecule at a time, but
An intense effort is being made today to build a quantum computer. Instead of presenting what has been achieved, I invoke here analogies from the history of science in an attempt to glimpse what the future might hold. Quantum computing is possible in principle - there are no known laws of Nature tha
We recount the successful long career of classical physics, from Newton to Einstein, which was based on the philosophy of scientific realism. Special emphasis is given to the changing status and number of ontological entitities and arguments for their necessity at any time. Newton, initially, began
We review the non-trivial issue of the relativistic description of a quantum mechanical system that, contrary to a common belief, kept theoreticians busy from the end of 1920s to (at least) mid 1940s. Starting by the well-known works by Klein-Gordon and Dirac, we then give an account of the main res
Sunspot observations with telescopes in 18th century were carried out in Japan as well. One of these sunspot observations is recorded in an account called Sansaizusetsu narabini Kansei irai Jissoku Zusetsu (Charts of Three Worlds and Diagrams of Actual Observations since Kansei Era). We analyze manu
In this paper, we discuss the role of Mathematics in articulating reality in theoretical Physics. We propose a parallel between empirical and theoretical work and investigate how scientists can also speak about reality without performing any laboratory trial, a key explanation element of STS. To do
It is seldom acknowledged the tremendous burden that the Nuclear Age leaves on future generations, and the environment, for an extremely long time. Nuclear processes, and products, are activated at energies millions of times higher than the energies of chemical processes, and consequently they canno
We review the definition and the concepts of the weak values and some measurement model to extract the weak value. This material is based on the author Ph.D. thesis 'Time in Weak Values and Discrete Time Quantum Walk' at Tokyo Institute of Technology (2011).
I make the case that the Universe according to unitary (no-collapse) quantum theory has a branching structure, and so can literally be regarded as a 'many-worlds' theory. These worlds are not part of the fundamental ontology of quantum theory - instead, they are to be understood as structures, or pa
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