History and Philosophy of Contemporary Theoretical Physics
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Upcoming Meetings
There are no currently scheduled upcoming events.
Past Meetings
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October 11, 2023
Canceled
Henri Poincaré: Science and Hypothsis (1905, chp. 3 + a bit from chp. 4); Yemima Ben-Menahem: Poincaré and some of his critics (2001).
Guest: Yemima Ben-Menahem
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September 13, 2023
"Why Was It Schrödinger Who Developed de Broglie's Ideas?" \ V. V. Raman and Paul Forman
Guest: Paul Forman
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May 10, 2023
The Einstein-Klein 1918 correspondence
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April 12, 2023
"Mie's Theory of Matter and Gravitation" by C. Smeenk and C. Martin and "Foundations of a Theory of Matter (excerpts)" by G. Mie as in "The Genesis of General Relativity - Sources and Interpretations" edited by M. Janssen, J. Norton, J. Renn, T. Sauer and J. Stachel (Springer, 2007), https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4020-4000-9
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March 8, 2023
* UPDATE: This meeting has been canceled. We will discuss Mie theory next month
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"Mie's Theory of Matter and Gravitation" by C. Smeenk and C. Martin and "Foundations of a Theory of Matter (excerpts)" by G. Mie as in "The Genesis of General Relativity - Sources and Interpretations" edited by M. Janssen, J. Norton, J. Renn, T. Sauer and J. Stachel (Springer, 2007), https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4020-4000-9
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February 8, 2023
In our next meeting we will focus on the influence of Weyl (1918) on the development of later gravitational theories, and discuss Erhard Scholz's paper "Gauging the spacetime metric – looking back and forth a century later". (Attached below)
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January 11, 2023
Weyl's "Elektron und Gravitation", as translated by O'Raifeartaigh in "The Dawning of Gauge Theory"
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December 14, 2022
Please find here Albert Einstein's two papers on Teleparallelism from 1928, "Riemann-Geometrie mit Aufrechterhaltung des Begriffes des Fernparallelismus" and "Neue Möglichkeit für eine einheitliche Feldtheorie von Gravitation und Elektrizität" (both published in Sitzungsberichte der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, p.217-221, p.224-227 resp.), as translated to English by David Delphenich (self-published at https://www.neo-classical-physics.info/spacetime-structure.html).
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November 9, 2022
Kaluza-Klein Theory
"On the Unification Problem of Physics" by Th. Kaluza (1921) and "Quantum Theory and Five-Dimensional Relativity" by O. Klein (1926);
English translations of the original papers, taken from "The Dawning of Gauge Theory" by L. O'Raifeartaigh
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October 12, 2022
Weyl's (1918) Gravitation and Electricity (German origin; searchable English version).
Group Conveners
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Guy Hetzroni
Guy Hetzroni is a member of the Department of Natural Sciences at the Open University of Israel and of the university’s Astrophysics Research Center (ARCO). He received his Ph.D. from the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2019, and conducted postdoctoral research as a Rothschild Fellow, visiting research fellow at the Freudenthal Institute at Utrecht University and an associate member of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. His research is in the philosophy of physics, focusing on epistemological and ontological questions in the context of the methods of modern physics. His current main research project conerns symmetry arguments in the context of quantum physics and gravitational theories.
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Bernadette Lessel
Bernadette Lessel is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, interested in historical epistemology of final theories, most specifically in an historical understanding of the development of fundamental physical theories into highly abstract, non-empirical formalisms. Her current research project analyses Wolfgang Pauli's engagement with unified field theory and how it influenced the early development of quantum gravity. Prior to being a postdoc in the history of science, Bernadette received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Georg-August-Universtiät Göttingen and studied physics and mathematics at the Philpps-Universität Marburg. Bernadette also held a visiting research fellowship at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, CA, and a teaching fellowship at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas (University of Tel Aviv).
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Noah Stemeroff
Noah Stemeroff is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bonn and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. He received his Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology from the University of Toronto in 2019. His research sits at the intersection of the history and philosophy of mathematics and science, and the history of philosophy. As a Humboldt fellow, he has been engaged in a study of the "mathematization of nature" implicit in the work of Hermann Weyl and Wolfgang Pauli, and their relation to the broader empiricist, idealist, and neo-Kantian traditions in twentieth century philosophy of science. This study will form part of a broader investigation into the manner in which mathematics and physics have been interwoven in the development of the gauge theories of modern theoretical physics.
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