Related papers: Some new reflections on Mr. Palomar
As in Greek mythology, the neutrino was born in the mind of Wolfgang Pauli to salvage a fundamental principle. Its existence met with universal skepticism by a scientific community used to infer particles from experiment. Its detection in…
A formulation of cosmology driven by fermions $\psi $ is studied. Assumption that the expectation value of the fermion bilinear is non-zero simplifies the homogeneous solution of the Dirac equations and connects the spinor field with the…
There has been an upsurge of interest lately in developing Wigner's hypothesis that conscious observation causes collapse by exploring dynamical collapse models in which some purportedly quantifiable aspect(s) of consciousness resist…
The year 2012 will be the fourth centennial year of the Jesuit Christopher Clavius (1535-1612), known as the Euclid of XVI century and the collaborator of the Pope Gregory XIII for the calendar reformation. In the occasion of the year of…
Carlo Cercignani was known all over the world for his works on the Boltzmann equation and on kinetic theory. There was however another aspect of his scientific life, which is not much known. Namely, his interest for the foundations of…
One of the abiding mysteries in the so-called standard cosmological model is the nature of the dark matter. It is universally accepted that there is an abundance of matter in the universe which is non-luminous, due to their very weak…
Several chapters in this book present various aspects of Michel Henon's scientific acheivements that spread over a large range of subjects, and yet managed to make deep contributions to most of them. The authors of these chapters make a…
In the stories of Carnacki, created by the English writer William H. Hodgson and written between 1910 and 1912, we find an interesting mixture of science and fantasy. In spite of the fact that Carnacki is a ghost finder, who investigates in…
Abner Shimony was an exceptional human being and a remarkably lucid and penetrating thinker whose work centered on some of the most significant physical and philosophical questions of his era at their nexus. He approached these questions…
In low-temperature high-density plasmas quantum effects of the electrons are becoming increasingly important. This requires the development of new theoretical and computational tools. Quantum Monte Carlo methods are among the most…
I examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, "perceptronium", with distinctive information processing abilities. I explore five basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other…
In 1929, Enrico Fermi wrote "Problemi attuali della fisica" ("Contemporary Problems of Physics"), a short article in Italian published in the magazine "Annali dell'istruzione media". The magazine was sponsored by the Italian Ministry of…
About a century ago, cosmic rays were identified as being a source of radiation on Earth. The proof came from two independent experiments. The Italian physicist Domenico Pacini observed the radiation strength to decrease when going from the…
Imagining what life on other planets, and intelligent life in particular, may be like is a long-running theme in human culture. It is a manifestation of the innate human curiosity about the Cosmos, and it has inspired numerous works of art…
A hallmark of human intelligence is Introspection-the ability to assess and reason about one's own cognitive processes. Introspection has emerged as a promising but contested capability in large language models (LLMs). However, current…
Mars has surely been scrutinised since the dawn of humankind. In the 16th century Tycho Brahe made accurate observations of the position of Mars that enabled Johannes Kepler to obtain his first two laws of planetary motion. In the 17th…
This paper is dedicated to Gabriele Veneziano on his 65th birthday. Most of the results reported here are known results, due to Gabriele, or obtained in collaboration with him, or inspired by our joint work on string cosmology. A few new…
We aim to bring a new perspective about some aspects of the current research in Cosmology. We start with a brief introduction about the main developments of the field in the last century; then we introduce an analogy that shall elucidate…
This pseudo-paper consists of excerpts drawn from two of my quantum-email samizdats. Section 1 draws a picture of a physical world whose essence is ``Darwinism all the way down.'' Section 2 outlines how quantum theory should be viewed in…
After World War II, a hyper-pragmatic paradigm was established in physics in most of the western countries, within which foundations of quantum mechanics were vastly dismissed as pointless speculations. In this paper, we show that in Italy,…