Related papers: Henry Eyring: Statistical Mechanics, Significant S…
Professor Chen Ning Yang has made seminal and influential contributions in many different areas in theoretical physics. This talk focuses on his contributions in statistical mechanics, a field in which Professor Yang has held a continual…
Some 80-90 years ago, George A. Linhart, unlike A. Einstein, P. Debye, M. Planck and W. Nernst, has managed to derive a very simple, but ultimately general mathematical formula for heat capacity vs. temperature from the fundamental…
In this reminiscence I discuss the influence of Henry Eyring and John Barker upon my life and work. Others, especially my family, have been of even greater personal influence. However, these two great and grand men were of tremendous…
The present form of quantum mechanics is based on the Copenhagen school of interpretation. Einstein did not belong to the Copenhagen school, because he did not believe in probabilistic interpretation of fundamental physical laws. This is…
Now that the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy has been found within the traditional theory, its physical interpretation should hide in quantum field theory in curved spacetime (only its quantum corrections require a detailed knowledge of quantum…
Half a century ago, Ihor Yukhnovskii elaborated a method of studying the critical point of the three-dimensional Ising model based on a layer-by-layer integration in the space of collective variables. His method was an alternative to that…
The chemical bond is a central organizing concept in chemistry, yet it is absent from the molecular Hamiltonian and no "bond operator" exists. Bonding is therefore not a primitive physical entity but a derived descriptor emerging from the…
Despite its enormous empirical success, the formalism of quantum theory still raises fundamental questions: why is nature described in terms of complex Hilbert spaces, and what modifications of it could we reasonably expect to find in some…
In the past 30 years there have been extensive discoveries in the theory of integrable statistical mechanical models including the discovery of non-linear differential equations for Ising model correlation functions, the theory of random…
Henry Stapp has for 60 years been a leader, perhaps the leader, in exploring the role of mind (psyche, consciousness, experience) in the ontology of quantum mechanics. Henry's contention is that the very structure of quantum mechanics…
From 1929 to his death in 1944, A. Eddington worked on developing a highly ambitious theory of fundamental physics that covered everything in the physical world, from the tiny electron to the universe at large. His unfinished theory…
Since its inception, quantum theory has been the subject of fierce interpretive controversy, which persists to this day. Disputed topics include the basic ontology and dynamics of the theory, the role (if any) of measurement, the meaning of…
The amazing quantum effect of `entanglement' was discovered in the 1935 thought experiment by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen (`EPR'). The ensuing research opened up fundamental questions and led to experiments that proved…
Probably the most dramatic historical challenge to scientific realism concerns Arnold Sommerfeld's 1916 derivation of the fine structure energy levels of hydrogen. Not only were his predictions good, he derived exactly the same formula that…
Einstein's article on the EPR paradox is the most cited of his works, but not many know that it was not fully representative of the way he thought about the incompleteness of the quantum formalism. Indeed, his main worry was not…
Quantum theory demands that, in contrast to classical physics, not all properties can be simultaneously well defined. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a manifestation of this fact. Another important corollary arises that there can be…
It is shown that quantum mechanics is, like thermodynamics, a phenomenological theory i.e., not a causal theory, ( not because it is a statistical theory - statistical theories with caused probability distributions can be regarded as…
Einstein was deeply puzzled by the success of natural science, and thought that we would never be able to explain it. He came to this conclusion on the ground that we cannot extract the basic laws of physics from experience using induction…
In this article, we argue that the theory of special relativity, as formulated by Einstein, is a philosophical rather than a scientific theory. What is scientific and experimentally supported is the formalism of the relativistic mechanics…
Even if Einstein brought major contributions as a founder of quantum mechanics, he remained deeply unsatisfied with the bases of this structure he knew to be so efficient for physics. His critics are often known through his numerous…