Related papers: Physics in Carnacki's investigations
Personal recollections on theoretical particle physics in the years when the Standard Theory was formed. In the background, the remarkable development of Italian theoretical physics in the second part of the last century, with great…
The discovery of cosmic radio emission by Karl Jansky in the course of searching for the source of interference to telephone communications and the instrumental advances which followed, have led to a series of new paradigm changing…
Classical physics has enabled the acquisition of significant knowledge of the physical properties of nature on a standard macroscopic scale. These achievements were driven by use of the causal ontological approach (proposed originally by…
Welcome to the 2008 TASI lectures on the exciting topic of `tools and technicalities' (original title). Technically, LHC physics is really all about perturbative QCD in signals or backgrounds. Whenever we look for interesting signatures at…
Personal recollections about Alexandre Grothendieck and early days of his theory of motives
The intriguing suggestion of Tegmark (1996) that the universe--contrary to all our experiences and expectations--contains only a small amount of information due to an extremely high degree of internal symmetry is critically examined. It is…
This paper takes James David Forbes' Encyclopaedia Britannica entry, Dissertation Sixth, as a lens to examine physics as a cognitive, practical, and social, enterprise. Forbes wrote this survey of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century…
The possibility that spacetime is extended beyond the familiar 3+1-dimensions has intrigued physicists for a century. Indeed, the consequences of a dimensionally richer spacetime would be profound. Recently, new theories with higher…
I will report below on a few examples of raving and insane (or maybe utterly genial) sentences that can be found in famous and otherwise admirable books of physics, because I genuinely believe it is amusing.
The essential role played by Chern--Simons terms in a variety of physical models provides yet another illustration of the unexpected but profound interactions between the two disciplines.
In spite of the great success of LHC experiments, we do not know whether the discovered "standard model-like" Higgs particle is really what the standard model predicts or a particle some new physics has in its low energy effective theory.…
The observation of space seems to have always caused wonder into people's collective consciousness, generating a series of historical myths. More recently specially with the development of better tools alongside the constant refinement of…
I provide a comprehensive review of indirect searches for New Physics with charmed mesons. I discuss current theoretical and experimental challenges and successes in understanding decays and mixings of those mesons. I argue that in many New…
Some aspects of replacing C based physics by C_{n} based physics are discussed. Here C_{n} ={R_{n},I_{n}} where R_{n} and I_{n} are the real and imaginary components of the numbers in C_{n}, and both R_{n} and I_{n}) are sets of length 2n…
This paper collects some problems that I have encountered during the years, have puzzled me and which, to the best of my knowledge, are still open. Most of them are well-known and have been first stated by other authors. In this sad season…
At very small scales, thermodynamic energy exchanges like work and heat become comparable to thermal energy of the system, which leads to unusual phenomena like the transient violations of Second Law. We explore the generic characters of…
Two problems from the Victorian Age, the subdivision of light and the determination of the leakage point in an undersea telegraphic cable are discussed and suggested as a concrete illustrations of the relationships between textbook physics…
Modern astrophysics is undergoing a revolution. As detector technology has advanced, and astronomers have been able to study the sky with finer temporal detail, a rich diversity of sources which vary on timescales from years down to a few…
I will give a short review the physics of strangeness enhancement in quark-gluon plasma, and argue that it is currently the best candidate of a signature of deconfinement. I will also discuss what strangeness abundance can tell us about the…
Paradoxes are a relatively frequent occurrence in physics. The nature of their genesis is diverse and they are found in all branches of physics. There are a number of general and special classifications of paradoxes, but there are no…