Foundations of Physics

• 1. Introduction

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  Foundations of Physics is a monthly journal that describes its own purpose in a single long phrase. It is "devoted to the conceptual bases and fundamental theories of modern physics and cosmology, emphasizing the logical, methodological, and philosophical premises of modern physical theories and procedures". Most scientific journals publish a result: a measurement, a calculation, a new observation. This one cares about the ground beneath those results. It asks what physicists assume, and why those assumptions deserve belief. A journal with that mission raises some obvious questions. Who decides which fundamental questions belong on its pages? Which famous names have shaped it over the decades? And what happens when a paper arrives claiming that the pillars of modern physics are simply obsolete?

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• 2. A Wide Field

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  Quantum mechanics sits first on the journal's list of subjects, and the list keeps going. Quantum field theory, special relativity and general relativity follow. String theory and M-theory appear beside cosmology, thermodynamics and statistical physics. Quantum gravity, the attempt to join the physics of the very small with the physics of gravity, completes the roster. The breadth is deliberate. The journal publishes results and observations that grow out of fundamental questions from all fields of physics, rather than from one specialty. A paper on the logic of thermodynamics and a paper on the structure of quantum gravity can therefore share an issue. What ties them together is the question underneath each one, and the people chosen to guard those questions are the next part of the story.

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• 3. Editors And Nobel Names

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  Foundations of Physics has been published since 1970, and its founding editors were Henry Margenau and Wolfgang Yourgrau. In 1988, Alwyn Van der Merwe founded a sister publication, Foundations of Physics Letters, for shorter submissions, and he edited it from the start. The two titles ran side by side until January 2007. That month, Gerard 't Hooft became editor-in-chief of the main journal, and the Letters were folded into it. 't Hooft had won the Nobel Prize in 1999. He was not the only laureate in the journal's orbit. Past members of its editorial board include several Nobel laureates, among them Louis de Broglie, Robert H. Dicke, Murray Gell-Mann, Abdus Salam, Ilya Prigogine and Nathan Rosen. In February 2016, Carlo Rovelli was announced as the new editor-in-chief. Before any of that, the Letters title had already published a series of papers that would test the journal's reputation.

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• 4. The Evans Episode

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  Between 2003 and 2005, Foundations of Physics Letters printed a series of papers by Myron W. Evans. Their claim was bold. They said that well-established results of quantum field theory and general relativity had been made obsolete. The body of work became known as Einstein-Cartan-Evans theory, and it stood in sharp contrast to the journal's usual care about foundations. The response came later, and it came from the top. In 2008, the new Editor-in-Chief, Gerard 't Hooft, wrote an editorial that distanced the journal from the topic of Einstein-Cartan-Evans theory. It was a public statement that a journal devoted to examining foundations must also be willing to say where it does not stand. The journal's standing is also measured in numbers. According to the Journal Citation Reports, its impact factor for 2021 was 1.276.

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