Using loop quantum gravity as an example, I will present how essential aspects of relativistic spacetime disappear in quantum gravity. The absence of spacetime in a fundamental theory of physics seems to undermine the conditions necessary for its empirical confirmation and thereby threatens what could be called its 'empirical coherence'. I will sketch how relativistic spacetime is thought to...
The year 1955 marked the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the formulation of special relativity by Albert Einstein. André Mercier, then head of the Theoretical Physics Department of the University of Bern, the city where the theory was formulated, decided to organize a large international conference to celebrate Einstein’s achievements. He obtained the prestigious support of...
Stefan Meyer - Director of the Radiuminstitut der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien – published 1937 a paper on the “age” of the sun (1).
1938 soon after this publication Stefan Meyer had to retire and quit the Membership of the Academy when the national socialists took over.
The outcome of this research was published by F.F. Koczy in 1943 in Nature (2) – thus at a time Stefan Meyer stayed...
Karl Przibram (1878 – 1973) studied at the Universities Vienna and Graz. 1902/03 he worked at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge under J. J. Thomson. He continued his research on electrical discharges as a Private Lecturer at Ludwig Boltzmann’s institute. His memories of the old institute in the Türkenstraße, where the first women studied physics, are fascinating. He created several...
The diffusion of gases, dry and moist, had been studied in 1874 by L. Dufour, who observed a pressure difference across a porous wall separating moist air and a vessel containing either water or a desiccant. 70 years later, H. Greinacher (1880-1974) claimed to have built the first Diffusion Hygrometer, proposed a theory and got a patent for it. Two different models were produced by firms of...
Since 2014 the Museum of the History of Physics of the University of Padua has been working on the study and valorisation of the collection of historical scientific instruments kept at the high school “Scipione Maffei” in Verona, one of the oldest high schools in Italy. The Cabinet of Physics of “Liceo Maffei”, founded in 1802, not only documents the evolution of physics teaching in an Italian...
