Related papers: Fritz Haber: The Damned Scientist
We find agreement between models of atmospheric chemistry changes from ionization for the 1908 Tunguska airburst event and nitrate enhancement in GISP2H and GISP2 ice cores, plus an unexplained ammonium spike. We then consider a candidate…
This recounting of the history of the last three-and-a-half decades of advanced accelerator concepts is offered from a decidedly parochial point of view -- that of the career of the author, Prof. James Rosenzweig of the UCLA Dept. of…
During a first St. Petersburg period Leonhard Euler, in his early twenties, became interested in the Basel problem: summing the series of inverse squares (posed by Pietro Mengoli in mid 17th century). In the words of Andre Weil (1989) "as…
The concept of fact has a history. Over the past centuries, physicists have appropriated it in various ways. In this article, we compare Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein's interpretations of the concept. Mach, like most nineteenth-century…
We discuss a less known aspect of Feynman's multifaceted scientific work, centered about his interest in molecular biology, which came out around 1959 and lasted for several years. After a quick historical reconstruction about the birth of…
Exactly a century ago, wave quantum mechanics was born in Arosa, Switzerland. Erwin Schr\"{o}dinger was vacationing in this classic Swiss Alps town at Christmas 1925 when he made his breakthrough discovery of the wave equation…
Naturally occurring nuclear reactors existed in uranium deposits on Earth long before Enrico Fermi built the first man-made nuclear reactor beneath Staggs Field in 1942. In the story of their discovery, there are important lessons to be…
The mid-17th century saw unprecedented scientific progress. With the Middle Ages well and truly over, the Scientific Revolution had begun. However, scientific advancement does not always proceed along well-planned trajectories. Chance…
Richard Feynman famously said that nobody understands quantum mechanics and cautioned against asking: "But how can it be like that?" Something about the conceptual foundations of the theory is profoundly puzzling, but just what is so…
An informal guide to the history of Heisenberg's matrix mechanics. It is designed for mathematicians with only a minimal background in either physics or geometry, and it is based upon Heisenberg's original arguments.
Stochastic diffusion equation, which attained prominence with Einstein's work on Brownian motion at the beginning of the twentieth century, was first formulated by Laplace a century earlier as part of his work on Central Limit Theorem.…
This paper is a faithful description of the author's career as a scientist, which often intersected that of Yves Couder. The emphasis of this paper is a true description of how the science that the author has been associated with really…
Quantum Mechanics (QM) has faced deep controversies and debates since its origin when Werner Heisenberg proposed the first mathematical formalism capable to operationally account for what had been recently discovered as the new field of…
The flow equation method (Wegner 1994) is used as continuous unitary transformation to construct perturbatively effective Hamiltonians. The method is illustrated in detail for dimerized and frustrated antiferromagnetic S=1/2 chains. The…
This memorial paper tells the story of the beginning of Boris (Boaz) Trakhtenbrot's long and rich life path, full of unusual and sometimes tragic events. This path led a boy from a Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe to be recognized as one…
This year marks half a century since Stephen Hawking made his greatest scientific discovery by theoretically proving that black holes aint so black, as they behave like hot bodies with an absolute temperature that depends inversely on their…
Edwin Alfred Holmes (1839 -1919) is best remembered for his discovery of a bright comet in 1892, now known as Comet 17P/Holmes. An amateur astronomer and authority on optics, he was an original member of the BAA and contributed to its…
Julian Schwinger's influence on Twentieth Century science is profound and pervasive. Of course, he is most famous for his renormalization theory of quantum electrodynamics, for which he shared the Nobel Prize with Richard Feynman and…
Wigner's famous and influential claim that mathematics is "unreasonably effective" in physics is founded on unreasonable assumptions about the nature of mathematics and its independence of physics. Here I argue that what is surprising is…
This article discusses the relationship between emergence and reductionism from the perspective of a condensed matter physicist. Reductionism and emergence play an intertwined role in the everyday life of the physicist, yet we rarely stop…