Related papers: Fritz Haber: The Damned Scientist
I summarize the apparent relevance of anthropic selection in understanding unnatural features of the Standard Model, and the consequent implications for theory. This topic, pioneered by Weinberg, could make him the last giant of physics.
Nitromethane (NM) is widely applied in chemical technology as a solvent for extraction, cleaning and chemical synthesis. NM was considered safe for a long time, until a railroad tanker car exploded in 1958. We investigate detonation…
Perception, sensation and re-action are central questions both in Psychology, Arts, Neurology and Physics. Some hundred years ago, believed to start with Wertheimer, researchers and artists tried to classify our human being "understanding"…
The historical background of the 19th century electromagnetic theory is revisited from the standpoint of the opposition between alternative approaches in respect to the problem of interactions. The 19th century electrodynamics became the…
The route to chaos as the pump power is raised in the Lorenz-like ammonia laser is studied using transients and compared with the route which is expected in the Lorenz Haken equations. The differences between the routes to chaos, as…
Heavy-Fermions provide an extreme example of the utility of the idea of continuity and analyticity in physics. Their discovery and study in the past thirty years has added a fascinating chapter to condensed matter physics. I briefly review…
The quest for the origin of matter in the Universe had been the subject of philosophical and theological debates over the history of mankind, but quantitative answers could be found only by the scientific achievements of the last century. A…
Artificial Chemistries (ACs) are symbolic chemical metaphors for the exploration of Artificial Life, with specific focus on the problem of biogenesis or the origin of life. This paper presents authors thoughts towards defining a unified…
The "dark age" of the Universe is generally pointed out as the period between the recombination epoch and the horizon of current observations (z=5-6). The arrow of time in the cosmic history describes the progression from simplicity to…
R. A. Fisher was one of the greatest scientists of the last century. He made many ground-breaking contributions, so many indeed that it seems almost impossible to list all of them. His revolutionary contributions to the design of…
Do We Inhabit The Best O All Possible Worlds? German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz thought so, writing in 1710 that our planet, warts and all, must be the most optimal one imaginable. Leibniz's idea was roundly scorned as unscientific…
It is not very well known that the philosopher Karl Popper has been one of the foremost critics of the orthodox interpretation of quantum physics for about six decades. This paper reconstructs in detail most of Popper's activities on…
The abundance anomalies in chemically peculiar B-F stars are usually explained by diffusion of chemical elements in the stable atmospheres of these stars. But it is well known that Cp stars with similar temperatures and gravities show very…
Fifteen years after the discovery of dynamical friction by Chandrasekhar, Michel Henon attempts to solve the longstanding problem of the divergence of the friction suffered by the perturber and caused by the most distant cluster stars. His…
Dark Energy is currently one of the biggest mysteries in science. In this article the origin of the concept is traced as far back as Newton and Hooke in the seventeenth century. Newton considered, along with the inverse square law, a force…
The Varenna school is a hub where generations of physicists, including numerous Nobel laureates, have shaped the field, often through collaborative exchanges across political and cultural boundaries. We examine the scientific legacy of…
It is known that Einstein's conceptual base for his theory of relativity was the philosophy formulated by Immanuel Kant. Things appear differently to observers in different frames. However, Kant's Ding-an-Sich leads to the existence of the…
Disavowed by one its fathers, ill defined, never empirically tested, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation has nevertheless had a powerful influence on fundamental physics. A well deserved one.
Primordial chemistry began in the recombination epoch when the adiabatic expansion caused the temperature of the radiation to fall below 4000 K. The chemistry of the early Universe involves the elements hydrogen, its isotope deuterium,…
The application of classical methods of statistical mechanics, originally developed by Ludwig Boltzmann in gas dynamics, to the description of social phenomena is a successful story that we try to outline in this paper. On one hand, it is…