History Biographies, History, Philosophy of Physics

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The discussion highlights the often-overlooked contributions of lesser-known physicists in the field, emphasizing that many have made significant advancements without receiving the recognition they deserve. Participants express disappointment that only controversial figures tend to gain prominence, while countless others remain in obscurity. Various biographies and historical accounts of physicists are shared, including works on notable figures like the Curies and lesser-known scientists like Titus Pankey. The conversation also touches on the importance of collecting and sharing these narratives to enrich the understanding of physics history. Overall, the thread advocates for greater appreciation of all contributors to the field of physics.
  • #101
sbrothy said:
I was a little inebrieated but found this note in my pocket when I came home:

"Nobel chemistry, David Baker, John Jumper, Demis Hassabis, "something with proteins".

I need to sober up before I unpack that. :smile:
Nobel gases that do not really really react with anything, related to proteins?
Be keen to see that synopsis.
 
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  • #102
pinball1970 said:
Nobel gases that do not really really react with anything, related to proteins?
Be keen to see that synopsis.
I really hope the sarcasm there was intentional.... But yes of course. I sometimes forget how smart you people on here are compared to the people I interact with on a daily basis. That came out arrogant but trust me there's a gigantic difference. In my daily life I'm a medium fish in a small pond. That's why I sometimes fall prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect on here.

I have acquaintances who can't even read and write. It's not that they are stupid but they are dyslexic and the school didn't do much back then.

EDIT: In those days if you were left-handed they forced you to use your right. Denmark has a pretty dark history regarding psychiatry. Forced lobotomies and sterilization... dark stuff. We are indeed a happy country.
 
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  • #103
sbrothy said:
I really hope the sarcasm there was intentional.... But yes of course.
Yes I was just ribbing you a little bit, British sense of humour ;)
sbrothy said:
I sometimes forget how smart you people on here are compared to the people I interact with on a daily basis.
Woah there, I'm not on that level!

The comment was just based on some knowledge of Chemistry.

Reading through the mathematics questions and answers and the all the physics stuff still blows my mind after 9 years on the site, it is a humbling but also a rewarding experience.
 
  • #104
sbrothy said:
I really hope the sarcasm there was intentional.... But yes of course. I sometimes forget how smart you people on here are compared to the people I interact with on a daily basis. That came out arrogant but trust me there's a gigantic difference. In my daily life I'm a medium fish in a small pond. That's why I sometimes fall prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect on here.

I have acquaintances who can't even read and write. It's not that they are stupid but they are dyslexic and the school didn't do much back then.

EDIT: In those days if you were left-handed they forced you to use your right. Denmark has a pretty dark history regarding psychiatry. Forced lobotomies and sterilization... dark stuff. We are indeed a happy country.
I had that in the 1970s and as as late as the early 1980s. A drum clinic of all places, I was the only left hander and the teacher said I would have learn to play right handed. I was better than the vast majority of the drummers so I decided to stay sinister.
 
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  • #105
pinball1970 said:
I had that in the 1970s and as as late as the early 1980s. A drum clinic of all places, I was the only left hander and the teacher said I would have learn to play right handed. I was better than the vast majority of the drummers so I decided to stay sinister

You must obviously have been devil-spawn! Nothing says pure evil as being a leftie! Imagine what they must have thought about people being ambidextrous?!

:-p
 
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  • #106
Michael Ellis Fisher: CV and achievements

This text was supposed to be included in the book "50 years of the renormalization group, Dedicated to the Memory of Michael E. Fisher", edited by A. Aharony, O. Entin-Wohlman, D. Huse and L. Radzihovsky, World Scientific, Singapore (2024). It will be included in future printings and in the electronic version of the book.
 
  • #107
Tensorial Quantum Mechanics: Back to Heisenberg and Beyond

Interesting footnote:

It is important to remark that most physicists are not interested at all in the many “interpretations” which are heatedlydebated in philosophical journals. As Maximilian Schlosshauer [38, p. 59] has recently described: “It is no secret that a shutup-and-calculate mentality pervades classrooms everywhere. How many physics students will ever hear their professor mentionthat there’s such a queer thing as different interpretations of the very theory they’re learning about? I have no representativedata to answer this question, but I suspect the percentage of such students would hardly exceed the single-digit range.”

EDIT:

Heh, I just found the official name for this kinda problem:

Newton's Flaming Laser Sword.
 
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  • #108
Some history:

Fusion divided: what prevented European collaboration on controlled thermonuclear fusion in 1958

I admit this one mostly intrigued me because of Sean M. Carrol. Also, I just think emergence is a cool concept.

What Emergence Can Possibly Mean

This one just kinda spoke to me intuitively:

Geometric Proof of the Irrationality of Square-Roots for Select Integers

Got all sorts of stuff going on. I'm trying to make my computer draw some fractals for nostalgia's sake but ended up wasting a lot of time on an invalid GPG server key problem. That now out of the way I'll be looking into John Baez beautiful roots as well. I have the GNU Scientific C++ API solving lots of 23th-degree polynomials but getting it on screen......
 
  • #110
Wow, here we're really venturing into metaphysics land:

The game of metaphysics

"Metaphysics is traditionally conceived as aiming at the truth -- indeed, the most fundamental truths about the most general features of reality. Philosophical naturalists, urging that philosophical claims be grounded on science, have often assumed an eliminativist attitude towards metaphysics, consequently paying little attention to such a definition. In the more recent literature, however, naturalism has instead been taken to entail that the traditional conception of metaphysics can be accepted if and only if one is a scientific realist (and puts the right constraints on acceptable metaphysical claims). Here, we want to suggest that naturalists can, and perhaps should, pick a third option, based on a significant yet acceptable revision of the established understanding of metaphysics. More particularly, we will claim that a fictionalist approach to metaphysics is compatible with both the idea that the discipline inquires into the fundamental features of reality and naturalistic methodology; at the same time, it meshes well with both scientific realism and instrumentalism"

EDIT:

Stumbled upon this one last second:

Hard Proofs and Good Reasons

"Practicing mathematicians often assume that mathematical claims, when they are true, have good reasons to be true. Such a state of affairs is "unreasonable", in Wigner's sense, because basic results in computational complexity suggest that there are a large number of theorems that have only exponentially-long proofs, and such proofs can not serve as good reasons for the truths of what they establish. Either mathematicians are adept at encountering only the reasonable truths, or what mathematicians take to be good reasons do not always lead to equivalently good proofs. Both resolutions raise new problems: either, how it is that we come to care about the reasonable truths before we have any inkling of how they might be proved, or why there should be good reasons, beyond those of deductive proof, for the truth of mathematical statements. Taking this dilemma seriously provides a new way to make sense of the unstable ontologies found in contemporary mathematics, and new ways to understand how non-human, but intelligent, systems might found new mathematics on inhuman "alien" lemmas."
 
  • #111
I stumbled across this paper on arXiv:

Nanopore DNA Sequencing Technology: A Sociological Perspectivephysics.soc-ph

Nanopore sequencing, a next-generation sequencing technology, holds the potential to revolutionize multiple facets of life sciences, forensics, and healthcare. While previous research has focused on its technical intricacies and biomedical applications, this paper offers a unique perspective by scrutinizing the societal dimensions (ethical, legal, and social implications) of nanopore sequencing. Employing the lenses of Diffusion and Action Network Theory, we examine the dissemination of nanopore sequencing in society as a potential consumer product, contributing to the field of the sociology of technology. We investigate the possibility of interactions between human and nonhuman actors in developing nanopore technology to analyse how various stakeholders, such as companies, regulators, and researchers, shape the trajectory of the growth of nanopore sequencing. This work offers insights into the social construction of nanopore sequencing, shedding light on the actors, power dynamics, and socio-technical networks that shape its adoption and societal impact. Understanding the sociological dimensions of this transformative technology is vital for responsible development, equitable distribution, and inclusive integration into diverse societal contexts.

I'll admit it was sheer coincidence and that my knowlegde of this particuar subject is practically nil. It does however scare me that the specific topic has apparently matured to the point where it's sociological ramifications seem worth discussing.

I realize YMMV with reagrds to "matured", "sociological ramifications" and "discussing". They may in fact vary a lot!

Using Wikipedia - which I know we don't do here - as a simple timeline it also looks like this technology is coming of age right about now. Not suprisingly boosted by the Corona Pandemic.

I've tried looking around at Preprint Server for Health Sciences and Preprint Server for Biology but having a hard time gauging the validity (harder even than I have on arXiv, where I'm a far cry for being any sort of expert).
 
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  • #112
Nanopore sequencing has these different effects in society etc. I am guessing its involvement and use in health issues and processes isthe basis of the sociological/ethical issues . It has long been the NIH's goal to make medicine more molecular and sequence based. This is the basis of their drive to individualized medicine. The ideal would be a genome sequence of every patient.
These are developing things.
Another medical use would be identifying pathogens (like Covid).

There are also research uses of course, but these probably don't fall into the bucket of sociological impacts being considered.
 
  • #113
I'm obviously been neglecting a lot of medical science, so that when some of the new stuff creeps up on me it has a tendency to freak me out!

Whether it should I'm not altogether sure though. It's not that old pictures from the ancient movie "The Fly" pops up in my head, but I must admit I feel kind of old sometimes.
 
  • #114
sbrothy said:
but I must admit I feel kind of old sometimes.
Getting older every day.
 
  • #115
sbrothy said:
Stumbled upon this one last second:

Hard Proofs and Good Reasons

"Practicing mathematicians often assume that mathematical claims, when they are true, have good reasons to be true. Such a state of affairs is "unreasonable", in Wigner's sense, because basic results in computational complexity suggest that there are a large number of theorems that have only exponentially-long proofs, and such proofs can not serve as good reasons for the truths of what they establish. Either mathematicians are adept at encountering only the reasonable truths, or what mathematicians take to be good reasons do not always lead to equivalently good proofs. Both resolutions raise new problems: either, how it is that we come to care about the reasonable truths before we have any inkling of how they might be proved, or why there should be good reasons, beyond those of deductive proof, for the truth of mathematical statements. Taking this dilemma seriously provides a new way to make sense of the unstable ontologies found in contemporary mathematics, and new ways to understand how non-human, but intelligent, systems might found new mathematics on inhuman "alien" lemmas."
I'm no expert but I'll say that what mathematicians are really interested in are "ideas" and insight as opposed to proving something. That is, it is hoped that a proof comes up with a new idea or technique that they can use in their own work. Mathematicians I'm told spend most of their time being "stuck", getting nowhere, hoping someone will come up with something that we get them over the hump. When it happens I'm told there is a "gold rush" of applying the new idea since getting in first is rewarded. It's nice if someone proves something in some complicated way but if it doesn't have a "new idea" then it isn't that big of a deal.

In some cases only a few -- sometimes a very few -- understand the proof. Then they may (or may not) come up with some newer simplified proof that gives insight. An example of that is Feynman diagrams and his "the particle takes every path" concept, which displaced the laborious math of Schwinger. (Yes, that's a simplification.)

An example of a proof that turned out to be not a big deal would be Hilbert's proof of the Waring Conjecture. It was complicated and didn't bring insight so it was impressive but didn't make a splash. Hilbert earned his fame elsewhere. An example of someone who was really good at insight was Alexander Grothendieck, whose category theory was widely useful and caught on bigtime. Georg Cantor came up with very simple proofs of important topics, mathematicians loved that. Kurt Goedel too.

Computerized proofs maybe began with the proof of the four color conjecture. It was nice that they proved it in this complicated way but it delivered no insight so it was a disappointment. More a relief in that whew, now we can work on something else. Lately I've heard that computers came up with a better compression algorithm. While this may not have provided much insight the result was a money saver and hence important. But this is more engineering than math.

If computers made a long complicated proof or refutation of the Riemann Hypothesis that provide no insight then I say it won't make much difference in mathematics. If someone then came up with a simpler proof that was understandable they might get the lion's share of the credit, as that is what mathematicians really want. Or if a computer comes up with a simple proof of something no one cares about, that won't mean much either.
 
  • #116
Hornbein said:
I'm no expert but I'll say that what mathematicians are really interested in are "ideas" and insight as opposed to proving something. That is, it is hoped that a proof comes up with a new idea or technique that they can use in their own work. Mathematicians I'm told spend most of their time being "stuck", getting nowhere, hoping someone will come up with something that we get them over the hump. When it happens I'm told there is a "gold rush" of applying the new idea since getting in first is rewarded. It's nice if someone proves something in some complicated way but if it doesn't have a "new idea" then it isn't that big of a deal.

In some cases only a few -- sometimes a very few -- understand the proof. Then they may (or may not) come up with some newer simplified proof that gives insight. An example of that is Feynman diagrams and his "the particle takes every path" concept, which displaced the laborious math of Schwinger. (Yes, that's a simplification.)

An example of a proof that turned out to be not a big deal would be Hilbert's proof of the Waring Conjecture. It was complicated and didn't bring insight so it was impressive but didn't make a splash. Hilbert earned his fame elsewhere. An example of someone who was really good at insight was Alexander Grothendieck, whose category theory was widely useful and caught on bigtime. Georg Cantor came up with very simple proofs of important topics, mathematicians loved that. Kurt Goedel too.

Computerized proofs maybe began with the proof of the four color conjecture. It was nice that they proved it in this complicated way but it delivered no insight so it was a disappointment. More a relief in that whew, now we can work on something else. Lately I've heard that computers came up with a better compression algorithm. While this may not have provided much insight the result was a money saver and hence important. But this is more engineering than math.

If computers made a long complicated proof or refutation of the Riemann Hypothesis that provide no insight then I say it won't make much difference in mathematics. If someone then came up with a simpler proof that was understandable they might get the lion's share of the credit, as that is what mathematicians really want. Or if a computer comes up with a simple proof of something no one cares about, that won't mean much either.
I'm sure. I'd expect the ultimate goal is the kind of immortality you get by getting a technique, discipline or branch named after you. Like Riemannian geometry, Clifford algebra or an Einstein ring. Heck, perhaps even one or more constants of nature. Newton did pretty good there, at least one constant of nature and a branch of mathematics!

WIKI: Things named after scientists

Tough luck when it goes wrong and someone else gets the credit, as in the example I recently mentioned here with H.C Ørsted. Or when it's something more obscure: first time I read about the "Killing-vector" it gave me a seconds pause ;)


There's a fun one here too:

Alexander von Humboldt


Many of these people also become obsessed and sometimes the line between genius and schizophrenia is a tight walk as shown in A Beautiful Mind.

The use of computers complicates stuff too yeah. I actually thought the 4-color thingy was still a conjecture but I was thinking of the ABC-one.

I'll admit that's one reason I like the historical and philosophical parts of the hard sciences. Sadly, I'm simply not that smart. I could have closed some of the gap with education but I don't think I'd ever achieve brilliance.

I'll just be thankful I can tie my shoelaces and appreciate the beauty in the fact that creation itself might one day be understood. If not by me personally at least weird gadgets almost always fall off the science-tree.
 
  • #117
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  • #120
Moving boundaries: An appreciation of John Hopfield


The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks." As noted by the Nobel committee, their work moved the boundaries of physics. This is a brief reflection on Hopfield's work, its implications for the emergence of biological physics as a part of physics, the path from his early papers to the modern revolution in artificial intelligence, and prospects for the future.
 
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  • #123
My friends and my path in physics


Dedication to my untimely departed friends, Dmitry Igorevich Diakonov, Viktor Yur'evich Petrov and Maxim Vladimirovich Polyakov.
 
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  • #124
sbrothy said:
My friends and my path in physics


Dedication to my untimely departed friends, Dmitry Igorevich Diakonov, Viktor Yur'evich Petrov and Maxim Vladimirovich Polyakov.
This is amazingly short. More references than text.
 
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  • #125
pines-demon said:
This is amazingly short. More references than text.
Yeah. I figure most of the references are suggested reading. Otherwise it doesn't make much sense. Well apart from them being papers by the departed.
 
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  • #126
pines-demon said:
Great read on Frédéric Joliot, it has become a forgotten figure even in France:
[...]

"Joliot was gifted, gutsy, and—not least—good-looking and personable.".

I may be a little prejudiced, if not outright bigoted, but those qualities seems to me to be in short supply among geniuses (genii?).

Attention is almost always drawn to their eccentricities / idiosyncrasies (to put it nicely).

:smile:

EDIT: I mean the personable one obviously.
 
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  • #132
Physicist David Bohm was one of Oppenheimer's students at Berkeley. He was invited to work on the Manhattan Project but couldn't get a security clearance. He did research on nuclear scattering at Berkeley -- (I once walked up to the cyclotron, nobody was around). The data was so useful it was classified, which meant Bohm was forbidden by law to write up his research for his thesis. So they made an exception and gave him the degree without it.

Later he was arrested for refusing to answer the questions of the House Committee on Unamerican Activities. Though acquitted this rendered him unemployable in the USA. On the strength of letters of recommendation from Oppenheimer and Einstein Mr. Bohm got a job in Brazil. His passport was revoked. In order to travel he became a citizen of Brazil, this requiring him to give up US citizenship. After a sojourn in Israel Bohm went to England and had a long career there as a professor of physics, honored with a fellowship in the Royal Society. He had a lengthy correspondence about psychology with mystic Jiddu Krishnamurti. In 1986 after a long legal battle Bohm was able to win back his American citizenship.
 
  • #133
Hornbein said:
Physicist David Bohm was one of Oppenheimer's students at Berkeley. He was invited to work on the Manhattan Project but couldn't get a security clearance. He did research on nuclear scattering at Berkeley -- (I once walked up to the cyclotron, nobody was around). The data was so useful it was classified, which meant Bohm was forbidden by law to write up his research for his thesis. So they made an exception and gave him the degree without it.

Later he was arrested for refusing to answer the questions of the House Committee on Unamerican Activities. Though acquitted this rendered him unemployable in the USA. On the strength of letters of recommendation from Oppenheimer and Einstein Mr. Bohm got a job in Brazil. His passport was revoked. In order to travel he became a citizen of Brazil, this requiring him to give up US citizenship. After a sojourn in Israel Bohm went to England and had a long career there as a professor of physics, honored with a fellowship in the Royal Society. He had a lengthy correspondence about psychology with mystic Jiddu Krishnamurti. In 1986 after a long legal battle Bohm was able to win back his American citizenship.
If there is no link, that fit this thread better: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/interesting-anecdotes-in-the-history-of-physics.1059261/
 
  • #134
An article about the "Helgoland myth of Heisenberg 1925", it's interesting because this year we celebrate 100 years of quantum mechanics:
 
  • #135
 
  • #136
pines-demon said:
An article about the "Helgoland myth of Heisenberg 1925", it's interesting because this year we celebrate 100 years of quantum mechanics:
Huh. Killjoy. Heis may have had the key insight on Helgoland, and what little evidence we have points to it.
 
  • #138
This looks like fun :smile: :

Tachyons Before Tachyons: Lev Strum (1890-1936) and Superluminal Velocities


"No particle or signal carrying information can travel at a speed exceeding that of light in vacuum. Although this has for a long time been accepted as a law of nature, prior to Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity the possibility of superluminal motion of electrons was widely discussed by Arnold Sommerfeld and other physicists. Besides, it is not obvious that special relativity rules out such motion under all circumstances. From approximately 1965 to 1985 the hypothesis of tachyons moving faster than light was seriously entertained by a minority of physicists. This paper reviews the early history concerning superluminal signals and pays particular attention to the ideas proposed in the 1920s by the little known Ukrainian physicist Lev Strum (Shtrum). As he pointed out in a paper of 1923, within the framework of relativity it is possible for a signal to move superluminally without violating the law of causality. Part of this article is devoted to the personal and scientific biography of the undeservedly neglected Strum, whose career was heavily and eventually fatally influenced by the political situation in Stalin's Russia. Remarkably, to the limited extent that Strum is known today, it is as a literary figure in a novel and not as a real person."
 
  • #139
I can't really speak for the scientific rigor or even value of this one but I always find these papers fun. I must also admit that this one seems to be philosophy for it's own sake. As always with interpretations of QM it veers into metaphysics pretty quickly. I'm not sure it makes sense to ask what particles "are", or "why" they're there instead of some other things. It looks like they did some work though (boldness mine):

How to be an orthodox quantum mechanic

"This work sets out to answer a single question: what is the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics? However, we adopt a different approach to that normally used. Rather than carefully surveying the precise details of the thoughts of Bohr and Heisenberg, we extract an orthodoxy empirically. To do this we review a collection of 33 textbooks on quantum mechanics, encompassing the most popular and prominent works of this nature. We then gauge their response to 12 propositions to build up a picture of exactly what is believed by an orthodox quantum mechanic. We demonstrate that this orthodoxy is largely unchanged over the past century, with some interesting emerging deviations, and has many aspects of Copenhagen-like viewpoints. However, it is more nuanced than some reductive characterisations that condense it down to the ontological primacy of the quantum state. The revealed orthodoxy has two main pillars: measurement inherently disturbs quantum states and these states refer to individual instances, not ensembles. More fully it entails that individual particles exist in wave-like super-positions and present particle behaviours only when forced to by outside influences. The act of measuring such a system inherently changes its state in a random fashion, manifesting in a form of measurement error that corresponds to the uncertainty principle. This implies that measurement does not reveal underlying values of quantum properties."
 
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  • #140
sbrothy said:
This looks like fun :smile: :

Tachyons Before Tachyons: Lev Strum (1890-1936) and Superluminal Velocities


"No particle or signal carrying information can travel at a speed exceeding that of light in vacuum. Although this has for a long time been accepted as a law of nature, prior to Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity the possibility of superluminal motion of electrons was widely discussed by Arnold Sommerfeld and other physicists. Besides, it is not obvious that special relativity rules out such motion under all circumstances. From approximately 1965 to 1985 the hypothesis of tachyons moving faster than light was seriously entertained by a minority of physicists. This paper reviews the early history concerning superluminal signals and pays particular attention to the ideas proposed in the 1920s by the little known Ukrainian physicist Lev Strum (Shtrum). As he pointed out in a paper of 1923, within the framework of relativity it is possible for a signal to move superluminally without violating the law of causality. Part of this article is devoted to the personal and scientific biography of the undeservedly neglected Strum, whose career was heavily and eventually fatally influenced by the political situation in Stalin's Russia. Remarkably, to the limited extent that Strum is known today, it is as a literary figure in a novel and not as a real person."
"A pint of lager please"

A tachyon walked into a bar.

Sorry could not resist.
 
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  • #141
pinball1970 said:
"A pint of lager please"

A tachyon walked into a bar.

Sorry could not resist.
That was also the level of seriousness I expected them to be received with, so it's all good. :smile:
 
  • #142
Einstein, Free Creations, and His Worldly Cloister

"This paper examines "Free Creations of the Human Mind: The Worlds of Albert Einstein" by Diana Kormos Buchwald and Michael D. Gordin. The authors seek to dispel the long-standing myths of Einstein as the "lone genius" of Bern and the "stubborn sage" of Princeton, drawing on newly uncovered archival materials to illuminate his intellectual networks and collaborative engagements. By exploring the authors' reasoning, this paper engages with their interpretations, highlighting the strengths of their archival revelations and areas where alternative perspectives may enrich the understanding of Einstein's intellectual development."

Only skimmed this one so far. I think we're all aware that Einstein, contrary to popular myth, didn't work in a vacuum, I seem to remeber reading that math wasn't his strongest side (still light years ahead of me, admitted). So I was a little surprised that - at least - Poincare and Minkowski wasn't mentioned in the paper at all. There's this BBC radio documentary:

The Mathematicians Who Helped Einstein,

who mentions he was helped by Jonas Bolyai, Nicolas Loachevski and Bernhard Riemann.

I think he also credited Newton, and Lorentz although that may have been more their research he meant.

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300th anniversary of the birth of Father Eliseo della Concezione: the scientific contribution in the Royal Academy of Studies of Palermo

"2025 marks the 300th birthday of Father Eliseo della Concezione, professor of Experimental Physics at the Royal Academy of Studies of Palermo. To celebrate this anniversary, the Physics and Chemistry Library of the University Library System and the Department of Physics and Chemistry - Emilio Segre' have organized several cultural activities. In the article, after a brief biographical description of Father Eliseo della Concezione, we will present the activities carried out and discuss the historical and educational aspects of Father Eliseo's work carried out during his stay at the Royal Academy of Palermo at the end of 18th century."

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Revisiting the Einstein-de Haas experiment: the Amp{è}re Museum's hidden treasure.

"Unearthed in the Amp{è}re Museum near Lyon, France, a genuine version of the Einstein-de Haas experiment apparatus offers a rare glimpse into Einstein's experimental interests. This remarkable find not only connects us to a crucial epoch in history of science but also highlights Einstein's rare tangible legacy in the realm of experimental physics."
 
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  • #143
How One Quiet Man Became Everyone's Sage: The Spiritual Recasting of Einstein


This paper critically examines the central thesis of Kieran Fox's "I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein"-namely, that Einstein's intellectual development constitutes a coherent spiritual path culminating in a form of pantheistic mysticism shaped by both Western and Eastern traditions. Fox presents Einstein as the modern heir to a long-suppressed lineage of rational spirituality, extending from Pythagoras and Spinoza to Vedanta and Buddhism, unified by wonder, reverence for nature, and a vision of cosmic unity. While Fox's account is imaginatively rich and philosophically syncretic, it risks conflating distinct conceptual registers -- scientific, metaphysical, and spiritual -- thereby oversimplifying Einstein's intellectual complexity. Drawing on Einstein's scientific writings and personal reflections, this study reconstructs a historically grounded portrait of his thought, emphasizing its tensions, ambiguities, and resistance to spiritual closure. The paper argues that, though rhetorically compelling, Fox's interpretation substitutes a harmonizing spiritual mythology for the conceptual rigor and epistemic humility that defined Einstein's actual worldview.
 
  • #146
Hornbein said:
So interesting. Has any progress been made?
Progress in what direction?
 
  • #147
martinbn said:
Progress in what direction?
Yeah, I kinda wondered what to answer but you beat me to it. :smile:
 
  • #148
A commented translation of Boltzmann's work, "Ueber die sogenannte H-Curve."

"Boltzmann's work, ``Ueber die sogenannte H-Curve," discusses his demonstration of the essential characteristics of the H-curve in a clear, concise, and precise style, showcasing his efforts to persuade his peers. To make these findings more widely accessible, the author aims to provide a translated version of the original article, while also correcting some typographical errors in the mathematical expressions with explanatory footnotes. The final section offers concluding remarks with graphs and relevant references for interested readers."
 
  • #149
From Geometry to Physics -- AZ: touches to the portrait

The process launched by Lobachevsky. The movement of the Kazan school of geometry towards physics. Personal memories of Alexei Zinovievich Petrov, the great Kazan geometer and theoretical physicist, who became the Author's Guiding Star. KeyWords: Alexey Zinovievich Petrov, geometry, general theory of relativity, Kazan University, Department of Relativity and Gravitation Theory, methods of teaching exact sciences.
 
  • #150
I have difficulty judging the seriousness of this one:

Like a coin spinning in the air: the effect of (non-)metaphorical explanations on comprehension and attitudes towards quantum technology

The complexity of the science underlying quantum technology may pose a barrier to its democratization. This study investigated whether metaphors improve comprehension of, and shape attitudes toward, quantum technology. In an online experiment (n = 1,167 participants representative of the Dutch population), participants read a news article that included a metaphorical, non-metaphorical, or no explanation of a quantum phenomenon. Both explanation types reduced perceived comprehension of the news article compared to the control group, but increased actual comprehension of the quantum phenomenon. No direct effects were found on affect-based or cognition-based attitudes. Mediation analyses revealed a very small negative indirect effect of explanations on attitudes, through lower perceived comprehension, and a very small positive indirect effect of explanations on attitudes via increased actual comprehension - though the latter was counteracted by a negative direct effect. As metaphors offered no additional benefit over non-metaphorical explanations, the findings suggest they do not provide a communicative advantage for enhancing understanding or shaping attitudes in this context.
 

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