127 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.
The paper argues that Hilbert space fundamentalism fails to account for the observed temporal changes in the physical world, as it posits that all reality is encoded in a static Hamiltonian and state vector without inherent mechanisms for evolution.
This paper traces the historical origins of right-handed and counterclockwise conventions in physics, particularly regarding the magnetic field, to demonstrate how these seemingly arbitrary choices significantly influence pedagogy, communication, and scientific advancement.
This paper reinterprets Fritz Zwicky's 1933 discovery of dark matter not as a naive or ad hoc adjustment to save Newtonian gravity, but as a cosmologically motivated, epistemologically grounded conclusion that anticipated General Relativity and was consistent with his theoretical expectations.
This paper argues that NASA's initiative to establish Coordinated Lunar Time is fundamentally flawed because it mistakenly treats synchronized time as an independent, transmissible physical entity rather than recognizing it as an observer-relative, model-dependent epistemic construct, a conceptual error that can be resolved by adopting a transactional framework based on bilateral atomic interactions.
This paper examines the nineteenth-century adoption and evolution of time signals in the Netherlands, tracing their transition from traditional visual cues like the *sjouw* and *lawei* to British-style time balls and eventually to Frederik Kaiser's rotating flaps, before their eventual obsolescence due to telegraphic and wireless technologies.
This paper examines the diverse and adaptive nature of Dutch colonial time signals in Paramaribo and the Dutch Caribbean during the nineteenth century, illustrating how these navigational aids evolved into civic rituals shaped by local environmental, fiscal, and political conditions rather than simple European replication.
This paper proposes a philosophical account of "technological understanding" as a cognitive skill analogous to scientific understanding, defining it as the ability to recognize how to use or design technological artefacts to achieve practical aims, a concept illustrated through MRI and superconducting quantum computers.
This paper argues that the spatial variations in particle separations within self-gravitating -body systems demonstrate that measured geometry is not a fixed background but an emergent, context-dependent construct shaped by internal gravitational interactions, thereby validating the operational perspectives of Poincaré and Einstein through modern numerical analysis.
This article provides a historical overview of C.V. Raman's extensive contributions to optics and optical spectroscopy, ranging from his Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the Raman effect to his diverse investigations into light scattering, diffraction, and the optical properties of natural phenomena.
This paper argues that modeling spacetime and classical fields with analytic functions rather than smooth ones leads to a "hyperdeterministic" universe where the hole argument fails, thereby demonstrating how philosophical conclusions in physics are critically sensitive to underlying mathematical formalisms.