VISMAYA: History & Philosophy of Physics

Tag: History

  • A more realistic view of science through history..

  • Astronomy in Africa: Who is studying it?

    Africa and Africans have had rich knowledge about astronomy. The authors of a recent paper on arXiv explore some interesting issues of where that knowledge comes from and who is exploring it.

    The abstract reads:

    Africa has deep and diverse traditions of astronomical knowledge, ranging from archaeological astronomy, pharaonic stellar timekeeping, and manuscript astronomy in Timbuktu and the Sahel, to ecological seasonal astronomy in southern Africa and calendrical computation in the Ethiopian tradition. These multiple epistemic traditions form part of a long intellectual history that precedes and intersects with contemporary astronomy on the continent. In the context of this long-standing intellectual heritage, an important question arises regarding the contemporary circulation of African astronomical knowledge within the global scientific system. This study therefore examines where African astronomical knowledge is produced, validated, and circulated in modern scholarly communication. Using bibliometric data from the Web of Science Core Collection, our analysis investigates publication and citation patterns in the research area Astronomy and Astrophysics between 2000 and 2025, with particular attention to the publication venues of African scholars. The findings highlight a critical paradox: while African researchers are active contributors to global astronomical discovery, the intellectual capital generated through this work is largely stored, validated, and circulated through publication systems located outside the continent. This pattern reflects broader asymmetries within global scholarly communication, where dominant publishing infrastructures shape visibility, citation impact, and authority. By applying a decolonial lens to metrics such as citation impact and ownership, the paper calls for a critical reassessment of the academic practices that sustain epistemic coloniality. It concludes that achieving scientific equity requires a strategic shift in publication choices to build and fortify a sovereign African knowledge archive.

    There are some impressive snapshots of old manuscripts. An example is shown below:

    There are many more interesting points in the manuscript. Check it out.

    Reference to the paper:

    Koch, Rhea, and Amare Abebe. ‘From Timbuktu to SKA: Who Owns the Astronomy Knowledge Africa Produces?’ arXiv:2608.21119. Preprint, arXiv, 21 August 2026. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.21119.

  • The Controversial Schrödinger

    12th of August is Erwin Schrödinger’s birthday…. Although he has been one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics (of the cat fame) and has contributed deeply to the subject matter, in recent years, he has become (in)famous for his non-academic life. For sure, he had a controversial personal life and has been deservedly criticized for that.

    Only recently, there has been some new archival information (see this) that throws more light on this and gives some benefit of the doubt.

    An important lesson: Great science alone does not guarantee good human qualities in a scientist.

    ps:

    To paraphrase and expand on something I wrote recently –

    We continue to celebrate science by a person because science is not only of that person, but of humanity….

    A person learns from others, transforms it and passes it on.

    The human mind is both a conduit and a seed of an idea. Lest we forget the soil, sunshine, water and air.

  • Schrödinger & Poetry

    Recently, I came across an arXiv upload that discussed poetry written by Schrödinger.

    Below is a flavor of Schrödinger’s poetry reproduced from the arXiv article:

    “The brooding sun rests softly on the lake

    And barely marks its shallow breathing

    As gentle waves rock up and down

    In heavy glare of midday heat.

    ….”

    One of the surprising things I learned is that Schrödinger was interested in becoming a poet but later turned to physics and mathematics to ensure financial security: “Thus, in a 1931 interview by the English journalist and science writer John W. N. Sullivan he said: “I took up mathematics and physics quite early … But I must not give the impression that science alone interested me. As a matter of fact, my early desire was to be a poet. But I speedily realised that poetry was not a paying business. Science, on the other hand, offered me a career”” (Kragh, 2026, p. 2)

    Schrodinger had a deep interest in cultural studies and wrote a lot about them, as the author points out: “Apart from being a brilliant physicist, Schrödinger was also a humanist scholar, a polymath who engaged in cultural studies relating to music, theatre, philosophy, history, philology, and literature [Gronau and Gronau 2021]. Science and Humanism and Nature and the Greeks, both books written while he stayed in Dublin, bear witness to his broad cultural interests.” (Kragh, 2026, p. 1)

    It is also intriguing to see a few other physicists try their hand at poetry, as in this case with Felix Bloch:

    “Erwin with his psi can do

    Calculations quite a few.

    But one thing has not been seen:

    Just what does psi really mean?” (Kragh, 2026, p. 2)

    The article also has a discussion on Schrödinger’s Galilean dialogue, which has inclinations towards the development of ideas in physics.

    Do read the reference below for more:

    Kragh, Helge. ‘Erwin Schroedinger: His Poetry and Fragment of a Galilean Dialogue’. arXiv:2607.29497. Preprint, arXiv, 31 July 2026. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.29497.

  • Rayleigh – criticize and resurrect..

    Classic and Classical.. Rayleigh..

    Criticism and resurrection, Rayleigh style..

    I propose to point out what I conceive to be the error which vitiates his reasoning, and afterwards to show that, after all, his theory is substantially correct.

    Reference: Note on the explanation of Coronas, as given in Verdet’s Legons d Optique Physique, and other works; London Math. Soc. Proc. 11. pp. 267—269, 1871

  • Conversation with Ashutosh Jogalekar

    Ashutosh Jogalekar is a scientist, science writer, and historian of science based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He develops agentic AI frameworks for science at Microsoft and is a Scientist in Residence at the Oppenheimer Project, where he studies emerging technology risks. Trained as a chemist, his interests span artificial intelligence, biotechnology, drug discovery, the history and philosophy of science, and U.S. history. He is also the author of the long-running Curious Wavefunction blog and has written for Nature, Scientific American, Fast Company, and the Lindau Meeting of Nobel Laureates.

    In this episode, we discuss his work, writings, various interests and his friendship and interaction with Freeman Dyson and many others.

    References:

    The Curious Wavefunction. n.d. Accessed 11 July 2026. http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/.

    X (Formerly Twitter). ‘Ash Jogalekar (@curiouswavefn) / X’. 9 July 2026. https://x.com/curiouswavefn.

    ‘Ash Jogalekar | LinkedIn’. Accessed 11 July 2026. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ash-jogalekar-0649934/.

    Jogalekar, Ash. ‘The Curious Wavefunction | Ash Jogalekar | Substack’. 15 June 2026. https://medchemash.substack.com/.

    ‘Ash Jogalekar’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, n.d. Accessed 11 July 2026. https://thebulletin.org/biography/ash-jogalekar/.

    ‘Ashutosh Jogalekar – 3 Quarks Daily’. Accessed 11 July 2026. https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/author/ashutoshjogalekar.

    ‘‪Ashutosh Jogalekar‬ – ‪Google Scholar‬’. Accessed 11 July 2026. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=voMehLQAAAAJ&hl=en.

    Scientific American. ‘Stories by Ashutosh Jogalekar’. Accessed 11 July 2026. https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/ashutosh-jogalekar/.

  • Criticism – just a science thing..

    Conclusion of a review paper:

    Reference:

    Beyer, Robert T. ‘Radiation Pressure—the History of a Mislabeled Tensor’. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 63, no. 4 (1978): 1025–30. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.381833.

  • The 5 Maxwellians

    One of the underappreciated facts is the amount of work that people did to bring Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism to the form that we use today. Among many enthusiastic researchers, five names often come into the picture, and they are Poynting, Heaviside, Fitzgerald, Lodge, and Hertz. Without their contribution, we would have been seeing a very different form of Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory and the equations named after Maxwell. As Loudon and Baxter describe: “The main influence on all of the activity in electromagnetic theory during the later years of the nineteenth century came from Maxwell’s famous treatise (Maxwell 1873). Poynting was a member of the group of young physicists led by Heaviside, Fitzgerald, Lodge and Hertz who developed Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory in the years following his death in 1879. They transformed his 1873 presentation into the formalism recognizable today as Maxwell’s equations.” (Loudon and Baxter, 2012, p. 1826)

    Interestingly, all five Maxwellians were not only interested in electromagnetic field theory but also applied it to a variety of practical problems. Poynting wrote an elaborate paper in which he describes the transfer of energy and momentum of electromagnetic waves titled “On the Transfer of Energy in the Electromagnetic Field” (Poynting, 1884, p. 343), and connected them to a series of interesting observations in electromagnetism. Among the seven applications Poynting discussed in his paper, the last one was on the theory of electromagnetic waves, and it is there that he computed the maximum value of the velocity of light. More on this in a future blog.

    References:

    Loudon, R., and C. Baxter. ‘Contributions of John Henry Poynting to the Understanding of Radiation Pressure’. Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 468, no. 2143 (2012): 1825–38. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2011.0573.

    Poynting, J. H. ‘XV. On the Transfer of Energy in the Electromagnetic Field’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, no. 175 (December 1884): 343–61. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstl.1884.0016.

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  • Bohr’s handwriting

    Niels Bohr had an interesting handwriting, and below is a gist as described by Pais1

    1. Pais, Abraham. 1991. Niels Bohr’s Times: In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity. Oxford Univ Pr. p. 10.
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  • Unified subject map of physics – 130 years

    An interesting paper on arxiv today, which charts the “disciplinary evolution of 130 years of physics”

    Nguyen, Khoa, Pragyan Pandey, Sophie Li, and Eric Y. Ma. ‘A Unified Subject Map for 130 Years of Physics’. arXiv:2606.14043. Preprint, arXiv, 12 June 2026. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.14043.