126 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 argues that the term "neutrinoless," which originated in 1953 and reflects a "sociology of suspicion," obscures the affirmative physics of matter creation by defining a fundamental process through absence rather than presence, necessitating a linguistic shift to "matter creation" to better align terminology with the radical nature of the laws being investigated.
This paper critically evaluates and refutes common, contradictory objections to pilot-wave theory by clarifying its radical novelty, addressing misconceptions about its physical implications, and arguing that it should be understood as a distinct, generalized nonequilibrium theory with revolutionary potential.
The paper claims to resolve the long-standing Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox by pinpointing its specific origin within the original chain of reasoning, despite the paradox having been historically cemented by Bell experiments.
This paper resolves Loschmidt's paradox by arguing that macroscopic irreversibility arises not from a breakdown of microscopic time-reversal symmetry, but from the dynamical inaccessibility of time-reversed microstates once chaotic evolution drives phase-space structures below the quantum resolution scale, thereby establishing entropy increase as a consequence of operational information loss rather than fundamental information destruction.
This paper argues that Bohmian mechanics has evolved from a controversial hidden-variable theory into a legitimate, pragmatic hydrodynamic framework for quantum mechanics, demonstrating its value as both a standard pedagogical tool and a versatile computational method applicable to diverse fields.
This paper proposes a framework for "stochastic supervenience" that redefines the dependence of higher-level properties on physical bases as probability distributions via Markov kernels, using information-theoretic diagnostics to distinguish genuine structural uncertainty from epistemic ignorance while preserving physicalist priority.
This paper distinguishes between the "Physical Stance" (governed by deterministic laws) and the "Causal Stance" (based on interventionist causation) to argue that physical determinism and physical causal closure are distinct concepts, thereby reconstructing Davidson's Anomalous Monism as a materialist position that preserves mental causation without contradicting physical determinism.
The paper argues that the extreme improbability of the specific fine-tuning constraints required for life, particularly within the chemical sector, demonstrates that the applicability of physical laws to biology is even more "unreasonably effective" than Eugene Wigner originally proposed.
This paper introduces the SESCC method, which dates ancient star catalogues by minimizing the cross-correlation between stellar proper-motion speeds and positional residuals, and applies it to the Almagest to provide statistical evidence supporting a pre-Christian Hipparchan origin over a later Ptolemaic one.
This paper advocates for a pragmatist interpretation of quantum theory that treats measurement outcomes and quantum states as perspectival facts relative to specific physical contexts, thereby resolving the measurement problem and nonlocality while maintaining that the theory's statistical predictions remain objectively valid for science because actual measurements are effectively certified within a single context of assessment.