Related papers: Fritz Haber: The Damned Scientist

Donald Rumsfeld, in attempting to excuse the inexcusable, once (in)famously said that ``there are things that we know we know; there are things that we know we don't know; and then there are things that we don't know that we don't know".…

The future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) is an accelerator-based international center for fundamental and applied research, which presently is under construction in Darmstadt, Germany. An important part of the program is…

Modern atomic and nuclear physics took its start in the early part of the twentieth century, to a large extent based upon experimental investigations of radioactive phenomena. Foremost among the pioneers of the new kind of physics was…

Since the daring intuition by Fritz Zwicky in 1933 about the existence of dark matter in the Universe, in spite of the extensive investigations pursued over a very long lapse of time, the nature of this matter and of its (other than…

This text tries to give an elementary introduction to the mathematical properties of infinite sets. The aim is to keep the approach as simple as possible. Advanced knowledge of mathematics is not necessary for a proper understanding, and…

The 19th century impressionist movement, as a reaction to "art pompier", is proposed as a comparison with modern evolutions in mathematics.

Aim of this paper is to retrace the path that led the young Enrico Fermi to write his paper on the statistics of an ideal monatomic gas. This discovery originated in his interest, which he had shown since his formative years, in the…

We recall the early theoretical speculations on the possible explosive uses of antimatter, from 1946 to the first production of antiprotons, at Berkeley in 1955, and until the first capture of cold antiprotons, at CERN on July 17-18, 1986,…

Early 17th-century mathematical publications of Johann Faulhaber contain some remarkable theorems, such as the fact that the $r$-fold summation of $1^m,2^m,...,n^m$ is a polynomial in $n(n+r)$ when $m$ is a positive odd number. The present…

The esteemed physicist Erwin Schroedinger, whose name is associated with the most notorious equation of quantum mechanics, also wrote a brief essay entitled 'What is Life?', asking: 'How can the events in space and time which take place…

A recent essay [1] reminds us of how richly Boltzmann deserves to be admiringly commemorated for the originality of his ideas on the occasion of his 150th birthday. Without any doubt, the scientific community owes Boltzmann a great debt of…

This is a chapter for a book in honor of Bernd Sturmfels and his contributions. We describe the contributions by Bernd Sturmfels and his collaborators in harnessing algebraic and combinatorial methods for analyzing chemical reaction…

One of Russia most prominent Enlightenment figures, Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765) was a polymath, scientist and writer, who made important contributions to physics, chemistry, astronomy, literature and education. Among his discoveries were…

Understanding where elements were formed has been a key goal in astrophysics for nearly a century, with answers involving cosmology, stellar burning, and cosmic explosions. Since 1957, the origin of the heaviest elements (formed via the…

My personal encounter with Weinberg's proposal of 1990 was a really entertaining one: My collaborator David Entem and I had embarked to show that Weinberg's idea, though smart and beautiful, was essentially useless in practice (like so many…

An argument, perhaps originating with Feyerabend a half century ago, and repeated many times since, purporting to establish that an "ignorance interpretation" of a bipartite pure entangled state leads to logical inconsistency, is incorrect:…

The recently published book, ``Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age'', by Patricia Rife (Boston: Birkh\"{a}user, 1999) is reviewed in an essay for the lay audience. Meitner was a leading nuclear physicist at the time that the…

This paper discusses the history of Fraunhofer's puzzling discovery of the fixed lines in various spectra (most notably of the sun) and the implications of these spectral "imperfections". Moreover, the developments in spectroscopy by…

Chirality or the property that distinguishes lefthandedness from righthandedness is an important aspect of the universe, starting from neutrinos, which are lefthanded. Fifteen years ago the author had proposed that life on the earth was…

Eugene Wigner famously argued for the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" for describing physics and other natural sciences in his 1960 essay. That essay has now led to some 55 years of (sometimes anguished) soul searching ---…