Related papers: Fritz Haber: The Damned Scientist
The second half of this essay tells the story of the genesis and early development of the notion of black hole entropy, in the style of an after dinner talk (apart from a long technical footnote). The first half sketches the development of…
Combinators were a key idea in the development of mathematical logic and the emergence of the concept of universal computation. They were introduced on December 7, 1920, by Moses Sch\"onfinkel. This is an exploration of the personal story…
The information-theoretic point of view proposed by Leibniz in 1686 and developed by algorithmic information theory (AIT) suggests that mathematics and physics are not that different. This will be a first-person account of some doubts and…
Diffraction is a phenomenon, discussed for centuries from various points of view. The very simple principle, proposed by Huygens [1] and then modified by Fresnel[2], Stokes [3] and Kirchoff [4], allows us to make calculations, substituting…
James Chadwick is known for his discovery of the neutron. Many of his earlier findings and ideas in the context of weak and strong nuclear forces are much less known. This biographical sketch attempts to highlight the achievements of a…
Sixty years ago Gell-Mann introduced, with a striking sense of caution, a new fundamental layer in the structure of matter. He christened the associated particles 'quarks', a name borrowed from the psychedelic flood of words of James…
Nested recurrence relations are highly sensitive to their initial conditions. The best-known nested recurrence, the Hofstadter $Q$-recurrence, generates sequences displaying a wide variety of behaviors. Most famous among these is the…
Fermi helped establish a new framework for understanding matter, based on quantum theory. This framework refines and improves traditional atomism in two crucial respects. First, the elementary constituents of matter belong to a very small…
The unexpected discoveries at the beginning of the century, particularly thanks to Heisenberg, Bohr, and Godel, has driven the science to drastic changes, opening new, extraordinary, and infinite research fields. After this, many scientists…
The article is an historical overview of some of the major contributions from different areas of Science with which, for centuries, it has been built up a scientific, sound and consistent vision of the atom. Some experiments that led us to…
Antimatter is one of the most fascinating aspects of Particle Physics and one of the most unknown ones too. In this article we concisely explain what is antimatter and its distinction between primordial and secondary, how it is produced,…
The following is a translation of the paper by Walther Gerlach and Otto Stern that reported the first evidence for the quantisation of atoms in a magnetic field. The atoms have quantum states corresponding to a limited number of possible…
The late Gerry Brown was not shy to tackle complex scientific problems that took time to play out but yielded in the end a deeper understanding of many-body phenomena. In this note, prepared for a memorial volume in his honor, we provide a…
Simon van der Meer was a brilliant scientist and a true giant in the field of accelerators. His seminal contributions to accelerator science are essential to this day in our quest to satisfy the demands of modern particle physics. Whether…
The mechanical action on matter of the electromagnetic field emitted by a fluctuating source is governed by its statistics. In particular, thermal sources and vacuum fluctuations exert on bodies those well-known Casimir (C) and Van der…
This history of the concept of fact reveals that the fact-oriented practices of German physicists and historians derived from common origins. The concept of fact became part of the German language remarkably late. It gained momentum only…
A relatively simple experiment, which has been proven to be fully reproducible, shows that in solutions of water and deuterated water, sensible quantities of fluorine are generated when a triggering energy is supplied in form of electric…
This paper is concerned with the problem of scattering of time-harmonic electromagnetic waves from an impenetrable obstacle in a piecewise homogeneous medium. The well-posedness of the direct problem is established, employing the integral…
A demonic being, introduced by Maxwell, to miraculously create thermal non-equilibrium and violate the Second law of thermodynamics, has been among the most intriguing and elusive wishful concepts for over 150 years. Maxwell and his…
A highly excited Friedmann universe filled with a scalar field and radiation has been considered. On the basis of a direct solution to the quantum-mechanical problem with a well-defined time variable, it has been shown that such a universe…