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 extends a geometry-first formulation of the Standard Model to spontaneous symmetry breaking and Yukawa couplings, demonstrating how these mechanisms can be explained through purely geometric terms that offer a more general and transparent account of charge quantization than traditional symmetry-based approaches.
This paper argues that Relational Quantum Mechanics requires a complementary account distinguishing physical interaction from informational coherence to explain observer persistence and ensure empirical confirmation in multi-observer scenarios, as the theory's current definition of an observer as merely an interacting physical system is insufficient.
This paper demonstrates how a classical physicist, by applying dimensional analysis to a hydrogen atom alongside empirical blackbody radiation laws, could have independently derived the Planck constant and reconstructed the energy and size scales of the Bohr atom prior to its historical proposal.
This paper argues that we cannot empirically determine whether the universe had a beginning, demonstrating that common defenses of a cosmic origin rely on confirmation theory errors and that, due to extensions of the Malament-Manchak theorems, observers in almost all classical spacetimes cannot distinguish between models with a past singularity and those that are beginningless or lack the requisite time ordering.
This paper discusses Erwin Schrödinger's discovery of the relativistic wave equation for a spin-zero charged particle in a Coulomb field and explains the reasons behind his decision not to publish it.
This paper provides a modern mathematical review of the Bohr-Sommerfeld atomic model, utilizing semiclassical methods to rederive quantization rules and energy levels while establishing their connections to the Schrödinger and Dirac equations.
This paper highlights the overlooked early development of symmetric teleparallel gravity by the authors and their collaborators between 2004 and 2013, while also reviewing their subsequent work and offering perspectives on the field's future.
This paper critiques the overly rigid philosophical account of de-idealization and proposes a more expansive, practice-driven framework—categorized into intra-model, inter-model, and measurement procedures—that demonstrates how physicists successfully justify idealizations and scrutinize models without requiring a full reversal to perfect realism.
This paper proposes a causal account of the Scientific Revolution, arguing that it emerged from the necessary alignment of individual psychological activation mechanisms and institutional alignment structures, which collectively transformed inherited intellectual tensions into durable research traditions specifically within the convergent environments of Padua-Venice and Oxford-London.
This paper presents an annotated English translation of two 1828 obituaries for Augustin Fresnel originally published in the *Revue encyclopédique*, including a detailed notice by Duleau and a shorter tribute.