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physics.hist-ph updates on arXiv.org
by
Karin Verelst
Fri Mar 24 2023 09:25:11 (1 day)
# 1.
Isaac Newton, in popular imagination the Ur-scientist, was an outstanding humanist scholar. His researches on, among others, ancient philosophy, are thorough and appear to be connected to and fit within his larger philosophical and theological agenda. It is therefore relevant to take a closer look at Newton’s intellectual choices, at how and why precisely he would occupy himself with specific text-sources, and how this interest fits into the larger picture of his scientific and intellectual endeavours. In what follows, we shall follow Newton into his study and look over his shoulder while reading compendia and original source-texts in his personal library at Cambridge, meticulously investigating and comparing fragments and commentaries, and carefully keeping track in private notes of how they support his own developing ideas. Indeed, Newton was convinced that precursors to his own insights and discoveries were present already in Antiquity, even before the Greeks, in ancient Egypt, and he puts a lot of time and effort into making the point, especially, and not incidentially, in the period between the first and the second edition of the Principia. A clear understanding of his reading of the classic sources therefore matters to our understanding of its content and gestation process. In what follows we will confine ourselves to the classical legacy, and investigate Newton’s intellectual intercourse with it.
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Joseph P Johnson, Susmita Jana, S. Shankaranarayanan (IIT Bombay)
Fri Mar 24 2023 09:24:58 (1 day)
# 2.
We show that Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) observations allow us to test the fundamental principles of General Relativity (GR). GR is based on the universality of gravity and Einstein’s equivalence principle (EEP). However, EEP is not a basic principle of physics but an empirical fact. Non-Minimal Coupling (NMC) of electromagnetic fields violates EEP, and their effects manifest in the strong-gravity regime. Hence, EHT provides an opportunity to test NMC in the strong-gravity regime. We show that, to the leading order in the spin parameter, NMC of the electromagnetic field modifies the black hole image in two ways: First, for one polarization mode, the horizon casts a shadow of radius \emph{greater than} $\sqrt{27} GM/c^2$ on the image of the source. For the other polarization mode, it is \emph{smaller than} $\sqrt{27} GM/c^2$. Second, the brightness and the position of the lensing ring are affected by the non-minimal coupling. The lensing ring is more prominent for one polarization mode than the other. Finally, we discuss the constraints on the NMC constant from future ngEHT observations.
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PhilSci-Archive: No conditions. Results ordered -Date Deposited.
Thu Mar 23 2023 01:02:56 (2 days)
# 3.
Broka, Chris A. (2023) Brains as Quantum Mechanical Systems – A New Model. [Preprint]
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physics.hist-ph updates on arXiv.org
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Stephen Boughn
Wed Mar 22 2023 09:35:31 (3 days)
# 4.
According to physicist David Mermin, the science wars was a series of exchanges between scientists and “sociologists, historians, and literary critics” whom the scientists thought to be “ludicrously ignorant of science, making all kinds of nonsensical pronouncements.” The science wars peaked in 1996 with the publication of a hoax article by physicist Alan Sokal in a cultural studies journal and then seemed mercifully to die away by the end of the 1990’s. I recently noticed, however, that the kerfuffle has persisted. This motivated me to pen this essay and point out the silliness of the entire affair.
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Wed Mar 22 2023 05:14:32 (3 days)
# 5.
Wolf, William J. and Thebault, Karim P Y (2023) Explanatory Depth in Primordial Cosmology: A Comparative Study of Inflationary and Bouncing Paradigms. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
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Tue Mar 21 2023 01:21:27 (4 days)
# 6.
Adlam, Emily (2023) Are Entropy Bounds Epistemic? [Preprint]
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Mon Mar 20 2023 01:56:31 (5 days)
# 7.
Deng, Natalja (2023) Commentary: “Physical Time within Human Time” and “Bridging the Neuroscience and Physics of Time”. [Preprint]
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Sun Mar 19 2023 01:12:41 (6 days)
# 8.
Halvorson, Hans (2023) Invariance and ontology in relativistic physics. [Preprint]
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Sun Mar 19 2023 01:08:25 (6 days)
# 9.
Lyons, Tony (2023) Relational space-time and de Broglie waves. [Preprint]
arXiv:2303.04787 (quant-ph)[Submitted on 8 Mar 2023]
Single-pair measurement of the Bell parameter
Salvatore Virzì, Enrico Rebufello, Francesco Atzori, Alessio Avella, Fabrizio Piacentini, Rudi Lussana, Iris Cusini, Francesca Madonini, Federica Villa, Marco Gramegna, Eliahu Cohen, Ivo Pietro Degiovanni, Marco Genovese
Bell inequalities are one of the cornerstones of quantum foundations, and fundamental tools for quantum technologies. Recently, the scientific community worldwide has put a lot of effort towards them, which culminated with loophole-free experiments. Nonetheless, none of the experimental tests so far was able to extract information on the full inequality from each entangled pair, since the wave function collapse forbids performing, on the same quantum state, all the measurements needed for evaluating the entire Bell parameter. We present here the first single-pair Bell inequality test, able to obtain a Bell parameter value for every entangled pair detected. This is made possible by exploiting sequential weak measurements, allowing to measure non-commuting observables in sequence on the same state, on each entangled particle. Such an approach not only grants unprecedented measurement capability, but also removes the need to choose between different measurement bases, intrinsically eliminating the freedom-of-choice loophole and stretching the concept of counterfactual-definiteness (since it allows measuring in the otherwise not-chosen bases). We also demonstrate how, after the Bell parameter measurement, the pair under test still presents a noteworthy amount of entanglement, providing evidence of the absence of (complete) wave function collapse and allowing to exploit this quantum resource for further protocols.
