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.
This paper introduces a "heptalemma" demonstrating that seven plausible theses about physical reality are jointly inconsistent with quantum mechanics while any six are consistent, thereby providing a novel framework for classifying quantum interpretations and diagnosing departures from classicality.
The paper refutes the claim that Hilbert spaces are unphysical due to unbounded operators, arguing instead that infinite expectation values are not problematic and that replacing Hilbert spaces with Schwartz spaces would introduce greater theoretical issues by excluding meaningful Hamiltonian evolutions.
This paper proposes a "bridge theory" framework, comprising partition, magnitude, and closure conditions, to explain how inter-level scientific connections require constructs that generate a "contingent space" of states not determined by either the underlying dynamical or observational theories alone.
The paper argues that the "problem of time" in quantum cosmology causes the disappearance of the time variable necessary to define the universe's age, thereby stripping classical models of their ability to make the physically meaningful prediction that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and suggesting a fundamental flaw in this approach.
This paper provides a comprehensive introductory overview of quantum mechanics, tracing its foundational postulates and exploring how various interpretations—from Copenhagen and de Broglie-Bohm to many-worlds and objective collapse models—address central issues such as measurement, nonlocality, contextuality, and the emergence of classical reality.
This paper argues that quantum computational advantage has indeed been achieved, despite the lack of consensus, and outlines future directions for theory and experiments in the field.
This paper expounds on and extends cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman's argument that human perception is an evolutionary interface for fitness rather than reality, by integrating key concepts from modern physics such as black holes, the holographic principle, string theory, duality, quantum gravity, and special relativity to support his view.
This paper argues that Soulas et al.'s proposed construction of a unique tensor product structure fails as a counterexample to Stoica's impossibility proof because it cannot simultaneously maintain invariance and compatibility with physical observations, thereby confirming the trilemma that preferred structures cannot emerge solely from the Hamiltonian and state vector.
This paper argues that the late emergence of chaos theory in the 1960s, despite its mathematical foundations being established by Poincaré and his colleagues decades earlier, was primarily caused by the strict empiricist tenets of positivism, which led to the dismissal of chaotic systems as "useless" and "meaningless" mathematics due to their perceived lack of grounding in experience.
This semi-historical article provides a basic presentation of quantum field theory's mathematical formalism and its essential features, such as particle creation and destruction, to readers familiar with classical and non-relativistic quantum mechanics while also aiming to engage interested non-physicists.