Related papers: Fritz Haber: The Damned Scientist
The influence of human activity own the earth's atmospheric composition has never been more pronounced. Anthropogenic pollution is in fact the largest effector of the observed evolving atmospheric composition (Wallace, 2006). PM2.5 is a…
Wigner's "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in physics can be understood as a reflection of a deep and unexpected unity between the fundamental structures of mathematics and of physics. Some of the history of evidence for this is…
At the beginning of the twentieth century, two scientists, the Austrian Victor Hess and the Italian Domenico Pacini, developed two brilliant lines of research independently, leading to the determination of the origin of atmospheric…
In 1965 the Nobel Foundation honored Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, and Richard Feynman for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics and the consequences for the physics of elementary particles. In contrast to both of his…
We retrace the first steps towards understanding neutrinos, particles predicted by Pauli in 1930 to avoid a supposed violation of time-translation symmetry. Despite the tendency to reduce the whole story to his intuition and the skill of…
The most distant quasar yet discovered sets constraints on the formation mechanism of black holes. Its light spectrum has tantalizing features that are expected to be observed before the reionization epoch ended.
Autocatalytic systems are very often incorporated in the "origin of life" models, a connection that has been analyzed in the context of the classical hypercycles introduced by Manfred Eigen. We investigate the dynamics of certain networks…
In the period from about 1890 to 1915 an interdisciplinary and unifying research programme known as "cosmical physics" attracted much scientific and public attention. It typically included aspects of the earth sciences (such as magnetic…
Around 1930, both Gregory Breit and Erwin Schroedinger showed that the eigenvalues of the velocity of a particle described by wavepacket solutions to the Dirac equation are simply $\pm$c, the speed of light. This led Schroedinger to coin…
Henry Stapp has made many significant contributions in quantum physics and its use in trying to understand the mind-matter relationship. I have been influenced by his use of the notion of {\em process} to bring more clarity to understand…
Because cosmic rays are charged particles scrambled by magnetic fields, combining direct measurements with other observations is crucial to understanding their origin and propagation. As energetic particles traverse matter and…
This is an annotated translation of E126 'De novo genere oscillationum', in which Euler derived for the first time, the differential equation of the (undamped) simple harmonic oscillator under harmonic excitation, namely, the motion of an…
Results on particle creation from vacuum by the gravitational field of the expanding Friedmann Universe are presented. Finite results for the density of particles and the energy density for created particles are given for different exact…
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…
From an astronomical and relativistic point of view, the Great War began with the August, 1914 capture and imprisonment of the members of a German eclipse expedition that had gone to the Crimea to look, at the request of Einstein, for…
The famous Miller-Urey experiment, which provides essential information on the prebiotic synthesis of the molecules of life, still has many obscure points. In this paper, we want to suggest a way of possible future progress, which consists…
For the better part of a century the field of nuclear astrophysics has aimed to answer fundamental questions about nature, such as the origin of the elements and the behavior of high-density, low-temperature matter. Sustained and concerted…
The possibility that experiments at high-energy accelerators could create new forms of matter that would ultimately destroy the Earth has been considered several times in the past quarter century. One consequence of the earliest of these…
In this article we discuss some consequences of the well-known proposition of Fritz Zwicky [1], published in the nineteen thirties, that Dark Matter `mimics' the inertia-gravitational behaviour of usual matter. In particular, we consider…
The potential for artificial intelligence (AI) to take over the work of physicists should be treated with glee. Here I evaluate one of the scientific discoveries in quantum photonics made by a leading AI in the field, in order to try and…