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"Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler", Albert Einstein
Browsing All Posts filed under »History and Philosophy of Physics«
Anatomy of a fall: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the story of g
Christopher M. Graney Every physics student learns about falling bodies and g, the acceleration due to Earth’s gravitational field. But few physicists learn the story of the first experiments—now more than three centuries old—to measure g. That story begins in earnest with the famed Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. In his 1632 tome, Dialogue Concerning the […]
Hawking: Great Scientist, Bad Gambler
April 18, 2013
World-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has conceded that he was likely wrong about his view that the Higgs boson doesn’t exist — an outcome he doesn’t find very exciting. Speaking at the Beckman Auditorium in Caltech, Pasadena, Calif., on Tuesday (April 16), the British physicist who is famous for developing the theory behind evaporating black holes […]
Feb, 11, 1939: Lise Meitner, ‘Our Madame Curie’
February 11, 2013
1939: Austrian-born physicist Lise Meitner publishes her discovery that atomic nuclei split during some uranium reactions. Her research will be overlooked by the Nobel committee when it awards a prize for the work. Meitner is a prominent example of a woman whose gender put her in the back seat when the top prize was given. […]
Why Einstein never received a Nobel prize for relativity
October 8, 2012
Nobel prizes often attract controversy, but usually after they have been awarded. Albert Einstein’s physics prize was the subject of argument for years before it was even a reality Stuart Clark - guardian.co.uk There was a lot riding on Einstein winning a Nobel prize. Beyond his academic reputation, and that of the Nobel Institute for recognising greatness, […]
Criteria of Science, Cosmology, and Lessons of History
August 28, 2012
Helge Kragh Perhaps more than any other of the physical sciences, cosmology exemplifies the inevitable contact between science and philosophy, including the problem of the demarcation criteria that distinguish science from non-science. Although modern physical cosmology is undoubtedly scientific, it is not obvious why it has this status, and nor is it obvious that all […]
The Making of a Genius: Richard P. Feynman
August 4, 2012
Christian Forstner In 1965 the Nobel Foundation honored Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, and Richard Feynman for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics and the consequences for the physics of elementary particles. In contrast to both of his colleagues only Richard Feynman appeared as a genius before the public. In his autobiographies he managed to connect […]
Is science without spacetime possible?
June 28, 2012
Nick Huggett, Christian Wuthrich Numerous approaches to a quantum theory of gravity posit fundamental ontologies that exclude spacetime, either partially or wholly. This situation raises deep questions about how such theories could relate to the empirical realm, since arguably only entities localized in spacetime can ever be observed. Are such entities even possible in a […]
The Antikythera Time Machine
June 8, 2012
Leonardo da Vinci may have left behind sketches of helicopters, tanks and submarines but it is rare that we find actual artifacts that seem so way ahead of their time. Almost like a science fiction tale of archaeologists finding a wristwatch buried deep in an Egyptian pyramid or motorcar under the foundations of Stonehenge, we […]
Newton saved the UK economy £10 million
May 29, 2012
by Jacob Aron Where’s a scientific genius when you need one? A statistical analysis suggests that Isaac Newton saved the UK economy the equivalent of millions of pounds by implementing measures tostandardise the country’s gold coins. Although Newton is famous for his theory of gravity, he also spent the last 30 years of his life […]
There are no particles, there are only fields
April 23, 2012
Art Hobson Quantum foundations are still unsettled, with harmful effects on science and society. By now it should be possible to obtain consensus on at least one issue: Are the fundamental constituents fields or particles? Experiment and theory imply a universe made of unbounded fields rather than bounded particles. This is especially clear for relativistic […]
The Universe, the Cold War, and Dialectical Materialism
April 10, 2012
Helge Kragh Ideological considerations have always influenced science, but rarely as directly and massively as in the Soviet Union during the early Cold War period. Cosmology was among the sciences that became heavily politicized and forced to conform to the doctrines of Marxism-Leninism. This field of science developed entirely differently in the Communist countries than […]
Quantum Theory without Planck’s Constant
March 27, 2012
John P. Ralston Planck’s constant was introduced as a fundamental scale in the early history of quantum mechanics. We find a modern approach where Planck’s constant is absent: it is unobservable except as a constant of human convention. Despite long reference to experiment, review shows that Planck’s constant cannot be obtained from the data of […]
The Relativity of Existence
February 24, 2012
Despite the success of physics in formulating mathematical theories that can predict the outcome of experiments, we have made remarkably little progress towards answering some of the most basic questions about our existence, such as: why does the universe exist? Why is the universe apparently fine-tuned to be able to support life? Why are the […]
Newton calculated that the world would end in 2060
February 18, 2012
Read also: Peek into Isaac Newton’s theology papers APOCALYPSE – Isaac Newton a prophétisé la fin du monde pour 2060 La controverse fait rage depuis des décennies : sir Isaac Newton, l’un des plus grands scientifiques de l’histoire, mort en 1727, était-il versé dans la théologie et le mysticisme ? Aux yeux de tous, Newton est […]
Seven equations that rule your world
February 13, 2012
Video: Equations that rule the world Read more: newscientist.com
The Early History of String Theory and Supersymmetry
January 5, 2012
John H. Schwarz This lecture presents a brief overview of the early history of string theory and supersymmetry. It describes how the S-matrix theory program for understanding the strong nuclear force evolved into superstring theory, which is a promising framework for constructing a unified quantum theory of all forces including gravity. The period covered begins […]
The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life
December 23, 2011
Luke A. Barnes The fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life has received a great deal of attention in recent years, both in the philosophical and scientific literature. The claim is that in the space of possible physical laws, parameters and initial conditions, the set that permits the evolution of intelligent life is very small. […]
Searching for Higgs: from LEP towards LHC
December 23, 2011
W.-D. Schlatter (CERN), P. M. Zerwas (DESY) After a brief introduction to the theoretical basis of the Higgs mechanism for generating the masses of elementary particles, the experimental searches for Higgs particles will be summarized, from bounds at LEP to inferences for LHC. The report will focus on the Standard Model, though some central results […]
Time in the 10,000-year clock
December 15, 2011
Danny Hillis, Rob Seaman, Steve Allen, Jon Giorgini The Long Now Foundation is building a mechanical clock that is designed to keep time for the next 10,000 years. The clock maintains its long-term accuracy by synchronizing to the Sun. The 10,000-Year Clock keeps track of five different types of time: Pendulum Time, Uncorrected Solar Time, […]
Sir Isaac Newton’s handwritten notes now available online
December 12, 2011
More than 4,000 pages of scientist’s works uploaded Includes seminal Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica Cambridge Digital Library Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk
The definition of Extraterrestrial Life
December 3, 2011
Philosophy and problems of the definition of Extraterrestrial Life Jean Schneider Abstract When we try to search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence, we have to follow some guidelines. The first step is to clarify what is to be meant by “Life” and “intelligence”, i.e. an attempt to define these words. The word “definition” refers to […]
Visions of Revolutions: Microphysics and Cosmophysics in the 1930s
November 30, 2011
Helge Kragh By 1930, at a time when the new physics based on relativity and quantum theory had reached a state of consolidation, problems of a foundational kind began to abound. Physicists began to speak of a new “crisis” and envisage a forthcoming “revolution” of a scale similar to the one in the mid-1920s. The […]
Reactionaries and Einstein’s Fame…
November 12, 2011
…. “German Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Science,” Relativity, and the Bad Nauheim Meeting Jeroen van Dongen Two important and unpleasant events occurred in Albert Einstein’s life in 1920: That August an antirelativity rally was held in the large auditorium of the Berlin Philharmonic, and a few weeks later Einstein was drawn into a […]
Marie Curie’s birth celebrated by Google doodle
November 7, 2011
Search engine honours Nobel prize-winning scientist who was renowned for her pioneering work on radioactivity The birth of Nobel prize-winning scientist Marie Curie has being marked by Google with a picture of her at her work bench on the search engine’s home page. The Polish-born physicist and chemist is renowned for her pioneering work on […]
Viking ‘sunstone’ more than a myth
November 2, 2011
Ancient tales of Norse mariners using mysterious sunstones to navigate the ocean when clouds obscured the Sun and stars are more than just legend, according to a study published Wednesday. Over 1,000 years ago, before the invention of the compass, Vikings ventured thousands of kilometres from home toward Iceland and Greenland, and most likely as […]
Archimedes Palimpsest…
October 26, 2011
….reveals insights centuries ahead of its time Thirteenth-century manuscript, overwritten with prayer book, deciphered after years of painstaking work Years of painstaking work by scientists to expose a manuscript hidden for nearly a thousand years have shed new light on the genius of Archimedes, antiquity’s greatest mathematician. Known as The Archimedes Palimpsest, the manuscript is […]
Could the Higgs boson explain the size of the Universe?
September 21, 2011
The Universe wouldn’t be the same without the Higgs boson. This legendary particle plays a role in cosmology and reveals the possible existence of another closely related particle. The race to identify the Higgs boson is on at CERN. This Holy Grail of particle physics would help explain why the majority of elementary particles possess […]
Did Einstein discover E = mc2?
August 24, 2011
Who discovered that E = mc2? It’s not as easy a question as you might think. Scientists ranging from James Clerk Maxwell and Max von Laue to a string of now-obscure early 20th-century physicists have been proposed as the true discovers of the mass–energy equivalence now popularly credited to Einstein’s theory of special relativity. These […]
A pendulum of horror
August 22, 2011
In 1842, the first American author of tales of horror, Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) wrote a short story entitled, The Pit and the Pendulum. Poe’s stories often contained a strong element of terror, in part, because he left many of the details quite vague, just as a standard technique of psychological terror is to keep […]
Samuel A. Goudsmit Papers available online
August 20, 2011
The Niels Bohr Library and Archives is pleased to announce that it has digitized the complete Samuel A. Goudsmit Papers (1921–1979, 30 linear feet, approximately 67,000 images). The Goudsmit Papers are a major international collection of correspondence, research notebooks, reports, World War II science documents, and other material of Goudsmit, a Dutch physicist who spent most of […]
The first science films
August 15, 2011
12 August 1930: Pluto: the new planet
August 12, 2011
Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 12 August 1930 It would seem all doubts as to the existence of the new planet announced from the Lowell Observatory in March last have been set at rest. Fifteen years ago the late Dr. Percival Lowell published his “Memoir on a Trans Neptunian Planet,” in which he […]
The cosmic microwave background and Andrew McKellar
June 19, 2011
It is generally supposed that the time order in which discoveries are made should have no eventual influence on our beliefs. But it is very evident that they do, and perhaps nowhere more importantly than with the cosmic microwave background. The cosmic microwave background first showed itself observationally to astronomers in the late 1930s and […]
The Curious Case of Lemaitre’s Equation No. 24
June 11, 2011
THE CURIOUS CASE OF LEMAÎTRE’S EQUATION NO. 24 Sidney van den Bergh In August of 1961 Abbé Georges Lemaître told me (with a twinkle in his eyes) that, being a priest, he felt a slight bias in favor of the idea that the Universe had been created. It must therefore have been a particular pleasure […]
Is this the greatest meeting of minds ever? Einstein and Curie among SEVENTEEN nobel prize winners at historic conference
June 10, 2011
It would be hard to imagine a more intelligent and brilliant group of people, let alone all these great minds in the same room together. However this was the case in 1927 when Einstein and his venerable colleagues gathered at the Solvay Conference on Electrons and Photons in Brussels. The International Solvay Institutes for Physics […]
May 5, 2013
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