Jenner Barretto Bastos-Filho
Jenner Barretto Bastos-Filho | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | April 9, 1949 |
| Residence | Maceió, Alagoas, Brazil |
| Nationality | Brazilian |
| Alma mater | Federal University of Bahia State University of Campinas ETH Zurich |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics, foundations of physics, history and philosophy of science |
| Institutions | Federal University of Alagoas |
Jenner Barretto Bastos-Filho (born 9 April 1949) is a Brazilian physicist and professor at the Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL) in Maceió, Brazil. His work spans general physics, the foundations of quantum physics, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, the history and philosophy of science, and science education. In 2024 he was awarded the title of Professor Emeritus by UFAL.
Biography
Bastos-Filho earned a bachelor's degree in physics from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) in 1971 and a master's degree in physics from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in 1975. His master's research addressed the properties of an electron gas at low temperatures together with an analysis of fundamental problems, drawing on statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. He completed a doctorate in physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) in 1982, and later undertook a postdoctoral stage at the University of Bari, Italy, in 1993.
He joined the Federal University of Alagoas as a faculty member in 1983 and served there as a full professor at the Institute of Physics for four decades, dedicating himself to teaching, research and the dissemination of the history and philosophy of science. He reached mandatory retirement in early 2024, and on 10 September 2024 the university's University Council (Consuni) voted unanimously to grant him the title of Professor Emeritus.
Bastos-Filho has also been associated with the Naples-based "Scienza e Democrazia / Science and Democracy" group, which, under the leadership of Marco Mamone Capria (Perugia) and Stefano Dumontet (Naples), organised four international conferences at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples in 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2008. Several contributions to those meetings appeared in the volumes Scienza e Democrazia (Mamone Capria, M., ed., Napoli: Liguori, 2003) and Scienze, Poteri e Democrazia (Mamone Capria, M., ed., Roma: Editori Riuniti, 2006), and are collected on the group's web page at dipmat.it/mamone/sci-dem.
Research
Bastos-Filho's research and teaching interests include general physics, the foundations of quantum physics, statistical physics and thermodynamics, the history, philosophy and sociology of science, epistemology, science education, and environmental education. Much of his published work examines conceptual and historical questions in physics, including the contrasting Cartesian and Newtonian conceptions of time and motion, the unification of Galilean physics with Keplerian astronomy in the light of Popperian criticism of induction, and interpretive problems in quantum mechanics such as probability, propensity and locality.
He has authored several books and dozens of journal articles and book chapters, and has served on the editorial boards of a number of science education journals. He was the first coordinator at UFAL of the National Professional Master's Program in Physics Teaching (MNPEF), and has supervised numerous master's dissertations in physics and science education. Among his books is O Que É Uma Teoria Científica? Uma Breve Provocação Sobre Um Tema Complexo (Maceió: Edufal, 1998).
Selected articles:
- "Cartesian and Newtonian Concepts of Time," American Journal of Physics, V54, N3, pp. 201-202 (1986).
- "Comment on Letter by H. Erlichson [Am. J. of P. 55, 104 (1987)]," American Journal of Physics, V55, N11, p. 969 (1987).
- "Conflitos entre os Principia de Newton e os Principia de Descartes," Cad. Hist. Fil. Cienc. (Campinas), S2, V1, N1, pp. 65-76 (1989) [with R. M. Xavier De Araujo]
- "Unificacao de Newton da Fisica de Galileu com a Astronomia de Kepler a luz da critica popperiana a inducao," Rev. Bras. Ens. Fis., V17, pp. 232-242 [A journal of Brazilian Physical Society]
Abstracts
- 1997 - "Correspondence and Commensurability in Modern Physics (a Study of the Compton Effect)"
- 1996 - "Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton and Modern Physics: Plenum, Action at a Distance and Locality"
- 1995 - "Propensity, Probability, and Quantum Physics"
- 1994 - "Dangerous Effects of the Incomprehensibility in Microphysics"
- 1993 - "Dimensional Analysis and Fundamental Physical Constants in N-Dimensional Spaces for Real N"