124 papers
This collection explores the fascinating intersection of physics and history, where scientists and scholars investigate how our understanding of the universe has evolved over centuries. These papers often examine the development of key theories, the social contexts of major discoveries, or the historical accuracy of scientific narratives, offering a unique perspective on how past ideas shape modern research.
Gist.Science curates every new preprint in this specific area directly from arXiv, ensuring you stay ahead of the curve. For each paper, our team generates both a clear, plain-language overview for general readers and a detailed technical summary for experts, making complex historical analyses of physics accessible to everyone.
Below are the latest contributions in the history of physics, ranging from archival studies of early experiments to modern reinterpretations of classic theories.
This paper analyzes the orientation of 326 Amazonian geoglyphs using remote sensing and archaeoastronomy, revealing a non-random alignment that indicates their builders possessed a significant interest in the Sun's annual cycle.
This paper outlines a "New Tractatus Program" that unifies recent relational interpretations of quantum mechanics and consciousness with an anti-totalitarian philosophy to argue that reality is not an absolute, perspective-free totality, but rather a de-absolutized domain defined by disciplined perspective-dependence.
This paper argues that the claim "spacetime emerges from entanglement" actually refers to three distinct phenomena—metric, gravitational dynamics, and topological connectivity—none of which fully satisfy the conditions for emergence because they rely on additional non-entanglement factors, with only gravitational dynamics qualifying as truly novel.
This paper examines the historical emergence of astroparticle physics as a distinct interdisciplinary field, arguing that it arose not merely from the convergence of particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology, but through the gradual reorganization of high-energy research around transcendent scientific problems, evolving experimental cultures, and new institutional structures.
This paper commemorates the centenary of A. A. Friedmann's pioneering cosmological models while highlighting how his work was suppressed and forgotten in the USSR from the 1930s to the 1960s due to ideological opposition against the concept of an evolving universe.
This paper applies persistent homology and network analysis to Han Dynasty data, revealing that the divergence between collapsing administrative and expanding geographic networks, alongside specific topological cycles and early-warning indicators, successfully generalizes the Roman collapse threshold to predict imperial fragmentation decades before formal dissolution.
This paper serves as an introduction to *Tractatus Quanticum*, a work that re-edits Wittgenstein's *Tractatus* by incorporating the principles of quantum mechanics, with the authors assuming the introductory role previously held by Bertrand Russell.
This study applies persistent homology and topological velocity metrics to a comprehensive Roman–Byzantine trade network (0–1453 CE), revealing that Western collapse was driven by a pre-existing structural entropy gap rather than data artifacts, quantifying Byzantine resilience through geographic-economic decoupling, and identifying a universal topological percolation threshold () at both the Western fall and the Byzantine endpoint.
This paper resolves the incompatibility between two gauge-invariant accounts of the Abelian Higgs mechanism by demonstrating, through constrained Hamiltonian formalism and -algebraic analysis, that the mechanism involves the spontaneous breaking of physical global symmetry (which persists under boundary conditions) rather than local gauge symmetry, thereby establishing the Coulomb gauge as the preferred framework for a consistent gauge-invariant description.
This paper argues that physical theories with irregular nomic structure, characterized by ill-posed equations of motion and surplus representational capacity, are best analyzed through a category-theoretic framework where symplectic reduction is treated as arrow composition, thereby establishing equivalence between theories with isomorphic reduced state spaces and laying the groundwork for their quantization.