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History and Philosophy of Physics papers — page 5

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Mars in the Australian Press, 1875-1899. 2. Circulation and Attribution
Between 1875 and 1899, Mars occupied a prominent and recurring position in newspaper reporting across Europe, North America and beyond. Although the scientific and cultural dimensions of this "Mars…
Richard de GrijsMar 24, 2026
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Mars in the Australian Press, 1875-1899. 1. Interpretation, Authority and Planetary Science
[Abridged] In the late nineteenth century, Mars emerged as one of the most intensively reported astronomical objects in the popular press, driven by favourable oppositions, improved telescopic…
Richard de GrijsMar 24, 2026
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Conventionalism in general relativity?: formal existence proofs and Reichenbach's theorem θ in context
Weatherall and Manchak (2014) show that, under reasonable assumptions, Reichenbachean universal effects, constrained to a rank-2 tensor field representation in the geodesic equation, always exist in…
Ruward MulderMar 22, 2026
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Ceci n'est pas un gluon
We discuss and then resolve a tension between how physicists treat gauge bosons and the celebrated "Wu-Yang dictionary", which identifies particle physics terminology with that of principal bundles…
India Bhalla-Ladd, Eleanor March, James Owen WeatherallMar 19, 2026
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Projection and Invariance in Scientific Explanation
Any representational enterprise must omit variation in order to function. NASA still uses Newtonian mechanics, though Einstein superseded Newton, and the standard picture of scientific progress…
Harry StickerMar 17, 2026
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Does Quantum Cosmology Predict the Age of the Universe?
The problem of time of quantum gravity has been argued to make canonical approaches unsatisfactory. In this article I study how it affects quantum cosmology and reach the same conclusion. The…
Álvaro Mozota FraucaMar 10, 2026
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The Architecture of Inter-Level Representation
Inter-level connections in science routinely require constructs that neither of the connected theories contains. Statistical mechanics requires assumptions such as the Stosszahlansatz to generate…
Harry StickerMar 10, 2026
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Blindspots of empiricism in the discovery of chaos theory
Chaos theory is a branch of classical physics, founded in the 1960s-70s, that studies systems whose solutions are sensitively dependent on their initial conditions. For many, it is surprising that…
Brett ParkMar 8, 2026
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Observational Indistinguishability and the Beginning of the Universe
Can we infer whether all of physical reality began to exist? Several novel results are offered suggesting a negative verdict. First, a common strategy for defending a cosmic beginning involves…
Daniel LinfordMar 4, 2026
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Lord Kelvin's Second Cloud
On April 27, 1900, William Thomson, better known as Lord Kelvin, delivered a visionary speech before the Royal Institution of Great Britain. In it, he presented two unresolved problems which, to him,…
Gilles MontambauxMar 4, 2026
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A dimensional analysis path to h and the Bohr atom structure
Traditionally, the Planck constant h makes its debut appearance in quantum physics textbooks in the context of the blackbody radiation law and subsequently as a fundamental ingredient of the…
Kostas GlampedakisMar 3, 2026
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Activation and Alignment: A Causal Account of the Scientific Revolution
Standard historiographical approaches to the Scientific Revolution illuminate background conditions but leave three puzzles unresolved: what triggered the initial escalation of inherited tensions,…
Harry StickerMar 2, 2026
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Portrait of the mathematician as a young man: Revisiting Trinity's Tayler picture
A 17th-century oil painting by an unknown artist, once owned by the Tayler family and now in the collection of Trinity College, Cambridge, is currently identified as a portrait of a young Isaac…
Alejandro JenkinsMar 1, 2026
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Evgeny P. Velikhov (1935-2024)
The master student at Lomonosov University in Moscow E.P. Velikhov formulated 1959 the theory of magnetorotational instability, which dominates current astrophysics. A meteoric career made him later…
Günther RüdigerMar 1, 2026
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The Birth of Quantum Mechanics and the Dirac Equation
The year 2025 marked the centennial of quantum mechanics, inaugurated by Heisenberg's matrix formulation and the foundational contributions of Pauli, Schrodinger, and Dirac. Concurrently, 2026 marks…
Volodimir Simulik, Denys I. BondarFeb 27, 2026
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De-Idealizing De-Idealization: Beyond Full Reversal
There is a question of whether de-idealization is needed for justified use of -- for 'checking' -- idealizations. We argue that the standard philosophical account of de-idealization has become too…
Yichen Luo, Eugene Y. S. ChuaFeb 24, 2026
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Dutch Colonial Time: Time Signals in Paramaribo and the Dutch Caribbean
In the nineteenth century, the Dutch established time signals in their Atlantic colonies to synchronise maritime navigation with European standards. In Paramaribo (Suriname), a sophisticated sequence…
Richard de GrijsFeb 22, 2026
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Marking Noon: The Time Balls and Time Flaps of the Netherlands
In the nineteenth century, the Netherlands quickly adopted the time ball -- a British innovation for maritime chronometer calibration -- in its main naval ports (Nieuwediep/Den Helder, Vlissingen,…
Richard de GrijsFeb 22, 2026
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C.V. Raman's Exploration in Optics -- A Spectrum of History
C.V. Raman (1888-1970) was one of the pioneering scientists to have emerged from India during the colonial era. His scientific explorations were driven by his curiosity to understand wave phenomena.…
G. V. Pavan KumarFeb 20, 2026
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The Causal Second Law
I argue that if a special science satisfies certain key assumptions that are familiar from physicalist accounts of the special sciences and from physics, then its causal regularities have an…
Balazs GyenisFeb 19, 2026
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The road of quantum entanglement: from Einstein to 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics
We explain the achievements that were awarded 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, as well as the preceding and the later developments. The main notions and historic cornerstones of Bell inequalities, the…
Yu ShiFeb 16, 2026
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A Huygens-Leibniz-Lange framework for classical mechanics
I discuss the physical basis of classical mechanics, such as expressed commonly using the framework of Newton's Principia. Newton's formulation of the laws of motion is seen to have quite a…
J. W. van HoltenFeb 15, 2026
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Making Symmetry Explicit: The Limits of Sophistication
Symmetry is often treated in philosophy of physics as an interpretive problem. A particularly lively dispute concerns local symmetries: do they indicate surplus structure that ought to be expunged,…
Henrique GomesFeb 14, 2026
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Scale Invariance, Variety and Central Configurations
Scale invariance has received very little attention in physics. Nevertheless, it provides a natural conceptual foundation for a relational understanding of the universe, where absolute size loses…
Maria I. R. Lourenço, Julian Barbour, Francisco S. N. LoboFeb 11, 2026
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Between equilibrium and fluctuation: Einstein's heuristic argument and Boltzmann's principle
We critically revisit Einstein's 1905 heuristic argument for lightquanta, considering its internal coherence and the scope of its applicability. We argue that Einstein's reasoning, often celebrated…
Enric Pérez, Antonio GilFeb 11, 2026
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