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History and Philosophy of Physics papers — page 6

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Historical Debates over the Physical Reality of the Wave Function
This paper provides a detailed historical account of early debates over wave-function realism, the modern term for the view that the wave function of quantum theory is physically real. As this paper…
Jacob A. BarandesFeb 10, 2026
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Spacetime singularities and incompleteness: epistemic and ontological remarks
I argue that spacetime singularities entail no ontological commitment to material entities. First, I show that Penrose's singularity theorem is best understood as a theorem of incompleteness, it…
Gustavo E. RomeroFeb 9, 2026
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Dark Matter in Zwicky's Cosmology: Towards an Epistemological Reconstruction
A new contextualised reading of Fritz Zwicky's 1933 article ''The redshift of extragalactic nebulae'' about the virial analysis of the velocity dispersion of galaxies in the Coma cluster leads to a…
Simon Beyne, Christian MarinoniFeb 9, 2026
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Intereses convergentes: los a\~nos previos a la visita de Einstein a la Argentina en 1925
We analyze in some detail the years leading up to Albert Einstein's visit to Argentina, from the moment he rose to fame after the publication of the results of the 1919 solar eclipse, until his…
Alejandro GanguiFeb 4, 2026
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From Florence to Fermions: a historical reconstruction of the origins of Fermi's statistics one hundred years later
Aim of this paper is to retrace the path that led the young Enrico Fermi to write his paper on the statistics of an ideal monatomic gas. This discovery originated in his interest, which he had shown…
Roberto Casalbuoni, Daniele DominiciFeb 4, 2026
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Todos estos edificios se hacen de diverso modo que en Europa: Estudio arqueoastron\'omico de las iglesias jesu\'iticas de Chiquitos
The study of the spatial layout of Christian churches has been of great interest since late Antiquity and the beginning of the Early Middle Ages, and has received a new impetus in recent literature…
Alejandro GanguiFeb 1, 2026
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Putting Pressure Under Pressure: On the Status of Classical Pressure in Special Relativity
Much of the century-old debate surrounding the status of thermodynamics in relativity has centered on the search for a suitably relativistic temperature; recent works by Chua (2023) and Chua and…
Eugene Y. S. ChuaJan 29, 2026
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The Beta-Bound: Drift constraints for Gated Quantum Probabilities
Quantum mechanics provides extraordinarily accurate probabilistic predictions, yet the framework remains silent on what distinguishes quantum systems from definite measurement outcomes. This paper…
Jonathon SendallJan 29, 2026
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Recovering Einstein Mature View of Gravitation: A Dynamical Reconstruction Grounded in the Equivalence Principle
The historical and conceptual foundations of General Relativity are revisited, putting the main focus on the physical meaning of the invariant ds, the Equivalence Principle, and the precise…
Jaume de Haro, Emilio ElizaldeJan 22, 2026
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Determination of the longitude difference between Baghdad and Khwarezm using a lunar eclipse (the method of Abu Rayhan al-Biruni and Abu al-Wafa al-Buzjani)
This paper examines how, in the tenth century, medieval Iranian scholars Abu Rayhan al-Biruni and Abu al-Wafa al-Buzjani determined the difference in geographical longitude between the cities of…
Rizoi BakhromzodJan 22, 2026
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Gatekeeping: a Partial History of Cold Fusion
One of the most public episodes of gatekeeping in modern science was the case of so-called 'cold fusion'. At a news conference in 1989 the electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons…
Jonah F Messinger, Florian Metzler, Huw PriceJan 15, 2026
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Astronomy in the Islamic World: a European Perspective
Mathematical and astronomical achievements of the Islamic World during its golden era are briefly exposed. Thie article is based on the invited talk delivered remotely at the ICRANet-Isfahan…
Richard KernerJan 14, 2026
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Viewpoint: On the Emergence of van der Waals Magnets: A Personal Reflection
The observation of magnetism in atomically thin van der Waals (vdW) antiferromagnets (FePS3, NiPS3, and MnPS3) in 2016 marked an important moment in the development of two-dimensional (2D)…
Je-Geun ParkJan 14, 2026
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Wave Function Realism and the Mathematization of Nature. A Phenomenological Perspective
This chapter reexamines wave function realism (WFR) through the lens of phenomenology. We begin by situating WFR within the broader debate about the ontology of the quantum state and the temptation…
Philipp Berghofer, Harald A. WiltscheJan 10, 2026
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Tractatus de Conscientia: A Tractatus-Style Sketch Toward a Modern, Physically Operational Theory of Consciousness
Tractatus de Conscientia is a tractatus-style sketch toward a modern, physically operational account of consciousness. It is also a tractatus-style attempt to talk about consciousness in a way that…
Mikołaj Sienicki, Krzysztof SienickiJan 3, 2026
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The Physics of Causation
Assembly theory (AT) introduces causation as a material property and establishes a metrology for objects produced by evolution and selection. The physical scale of causation is quantified by the…
Leroy Cronin, Sara I. WalkerJan 2, 2026
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From Grounding to Stabilisation: Adequacy as a Criterion for Scientific Explanation
This paper develops a process-based account of scientific explanation that reconceives grounding in terms of stabilisation. Grounding theories capture hierarchical dependence but lack criteria for…
Jonathon SendallJan 1, 2026
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The Logical Structure of Physical Laws: A Fixed Point Reconstruction
We formalise the self-referential definition of physical laws using monotone operators on a lattice of theories, resolving the pathologies of naive set-theoretic formulations. By invoking Tarski…
Eren Volkan KüçükDec 31, 2025
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Event Horizons, Spacetime Geometry, and the Limits of Integrated Consciousness
What happens to a unified conscious field when its physical implementation straddles a black hole event horizon? This paper addresses that question for integration-based theories, including…
Jonathon SendallDec 28, 2025
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On Huygens' derivation of the laws of elastic collisions
In this note I sketch the work of Christiaan Huygens to develop a theory of motion and its application to elastic collisions. In this theory he uses the relativity of uniform linear motion to derive…
Jan-Willem van HoltenDec 28, 2025
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Actual Physics, Observation, and Quantum Theory
Since its inception, quantum theory has been the subject of fierce interpretive controversy, which persists to this day. Disputed topics include the basic ontology and dynamics of the theory, the…
Tim MaudlinDec 27, 2025
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Determinism and Indeterminism as Model Artefacts: Toward a Model-Invariant Ontology of Physics
This paper argues that the traditional opposition between determinism and indeterminism in physics is representational rather than ontological. Deterministic-stochastic dualities are available in…
David NollandDec 27, 2025
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Professor Hideki Yukawa's Anguish and a Lifelong Decision During a Three-Day Visit to Kochi to Unveil His First Bronze Statue: From a Cave Bat to the World
In 1954, following a five-year research period in the U.S., Professor Hideki Yukawa returned to Japan and visited Kochi on March 21 to attend the unveiling ceremony for the first statue of him ever…
Shigeo OhkuboDec 26, 2025
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What is Stochastic Supervenience?
Standard formulations of supervenience typically treat higher level properties as point valued facts strictly fixed by underlying base states. However, in many scientific domains, from statistical…
Youheng ZhangDec 20, 2025
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How physics got its right hand: The origins of chiral conventions in electromagnetism
Why do physicists almost universally take the direction of positive rotation to be counterclockwise, and three-dimensional coordinates to be right-handed? This paper traces the historical development…
Tyler McMakenDec 19, 2025
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