Conveners
Physics and other sciences
- enrico giannetto (Università di Bergamo)
In two letters written to the famous musician Cipriano de Rore (c 1515–1565), Giovanni Battista Benedetti (1530-1590) afforded two different kinds of problems: one mathematical, raised by just intonation (a system of tuning where the goal is pure intervals with simple acoustical ratios) and the other physical, raised by the nature of observed consonances of two different tones having...
In 1952 A.L. Hodgkin and A.F. Huxley published what has become known as the model of the action potential. It was subsequently considered as the cornerstone of electrophysiology and neuroscience, since concerning the ionic mechanisms involved in the nerve cell membrane. The history of the HH model on the one hand is an example of use of scientific experiment and laws of physics within life...
The present work reconstructs the history of the so-called uncertainty principle, from its first formulation to a recent diatribe on its correct mathematical formalization. In his 1927 paper, Heisenberg proposed two different kinds of uncertainty. One is called “statistical” or “intrinsic”, due to the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics and rigorously demonstrated by Robertson. The...
Previous scholars all studied symmetries according to classical logic; yet, the same word “sym-metry”, coming from the Greek “συμμετρία” = “measuring together”, means measuring according to a modality; hence, this word belongs to modal logic. In its turn modal logic is equivalent through its S4 model to intuitionist logic (Hughes and Cresswell 1996, pp. 224ff.), where the double negation law...
In the second half of the XVIII century, during a period that was strongly characterized by studies on electric phenomena, a hypothesis appeared about an electric origin of earthquakes, based on empirical evidence considered solid, and apparently also confirmed by model experiments. While developing into an explanatory theory of a strongly empirical nature, it nevertheless presented a “clean”...
