Related papers: Grete Hermann: An early contributor to quantum the…
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…
We begin by discussing ``What exists?'', i.e. ontology, in Classical Physics which provided a description of physical phenomena at the macroscopic level. The microworld however necessitates a introduction of Quantum ideas for its…
The seminal work by Sadi Carnot in the early nineteenth century provided the blueprint of a reversible heat engine and the celebrated second law of thermodynamics eventually followed. Almost two centuries later, the quest to formulate a…
A generalized theory unifying gravity with electromagnetism was proposed by Einstein in 1945. He considered a Hermitian metric on a real space-time. In this work we review Einstein's idea and generalize it further to consider gravity in a…
The radical changes in the concepts and approach in Physics at the turn of the Nineteenth century were so deep, that is acknowledged as a revolution. However, in 1970 Thomas Kuhn's careful reconstruction of the researches on the black body…
In the century following its discovery, applications for quantum physics are opening a new world of technological possibilities. With the current decade witnessing quantum supremacy, quantum technologies are already starting to change the…
During the past 30 years, research in general relativity has brought to light strong hints of a very deep and fundamental relationship between gravitation, thermodynamics, and quantum theory. The most striking indication of such a…
Detlef D\"urr (1951-2021) was a theoretical and mathematical physicist who worked particularly on the foundations of quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, and statistical mechanics. This piece is a rather personal look back at him and his…
James Burkett Hartle was a theoretical physicist who made major contributions to our understanding of relativistic stars, black holes, and cosmology. Most of his career, however, was devoted to studying the universe as a quantum system. As…
Quantum coherence is a fundamental property of quantum systems, separating quantum from classical physics. Recently, there has been significant interest in the characterization of quantum coherence as a resource, investigating how coherence…
Thought experiments are where logical reasoning meets storytelling, catalysing progress in quantum science and technology. Schr\"odinger's famous cat brought quantum science to the public consciousness, while Deutsch's thought experiment to…
I give a very brief introduction to the use of effective field theory techniques in quantum calculations of general relativity. The gravitational interaction is naturally organized as a quantum effective field theory and a certain class of…
Sophie Germain (1776-1831) was the first woman we know who did important original research in mathematics, specifically in elasticity theory and number theory. Celebrating her semiquincentennial year, we outline Germain's recently unearthed…
The pioneering work of E.C.G. Stueckelberg is briefly analyzed: the formalism of the Stueckelberg field, able to describe a massive vector field, is reviewed, and some applications are presented. In particular, starting from his very first…
One of the most important goals in quantum thermodynamics is to demonstrate advantages of thermodynamic protocols over their classical counterparts. For that, it is necessary to (i) develop theoretical tools and experimental set-ups to deal…
Gravity plays an important part in the experiments and discoveries of the modern world. But how was it discovered? Surely Newton and Einstein were not the only people to observe it and account for it. It had been a long path before the full…
The theory of quantum computation is presented in a self contained way from a computer science perspective. The basics of classical computation and quantum mechanics is reviewed. The circuit model of quantum computation is presented in…
It is shown that adopting the \emph{Quantum Field} ---extended entity in space-time build by dynamic appearance propagation and annihilation of virtual particles--- as the primary ontology the astonishing features of quantum mechanics can…
We suggest that not only quanta may have played a role in Einstein's ideas on relativity, but that they themselves may be related to the dynamical and relativistic behaviour of the electromagnetic field exhibited in a Poincar\'e's 1900…
Orthodox Copenhagen quantum theory renounces the quest to understand the reality in which we are imbedded, and settles for practical rules that describe connections between our observations. Many physicist have believed that this…