Related papers: Rutherford, Radioactivity, and the Atomic Nucleus
We recall the path breaking contributions of the nuclear theory group of the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre, Kolkata. From a beginning of just one person in 1970s, the group has steadily developed into a leading group in the country…
150 years after the discovery of quaternions, Hamilton's conjecture that quaternions are a fundamental language for physics is reevaluated and shown to be essentially correct, provided one admits complex numbers in both classical and…
We briefly describe in this paper the passage from Mendeleev's chemistry (1869) to atomic physics (in the 1900's), nuclear physics (in the 1932's) and particle physics (from 1953 to 2006). We show how the consideration of symmetries,…
Physics of radioactive nuclear beams is one of the main frontiers of nuclear science today. Experimentally, thanks to technological developments, we are on the verge of invading the territory of extreme N/Z ratios in an unprecedented way.…
Three extraordinary physics discoveries were made from colonial India, which did not have any previous tradition of research in modern physics: Saha ionization equation (1920), Bose statistics (1924), Raman effect (1928). All the three…
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…
The last Nobel Prize of the Millenium in Physics has been awarded jointly to Professor Gerardus 't Hooft of the University of Utrecht in Holland and his thesis advisor Professor Emeritus Martinus J.G. Veltman of Holland. According to the…
A consistent classical and quantum relativistic mechanics can be constructed if Einstein's covariant time is considered as a dynamical variable. The evolution of a system is then parametrized by a universal invariant identified with…
From a rigorous historic analysis of 1686 I. Newton and 1905 A. Einstein works where the last derived the universal mass-energy relationship, it is concluded that rest mass measures potential energy. From the same formula used to obtain…
The notion from ab-initio molecular dynamics simulations that nuclear motion is best described by classical Newton dynamics instead of the time-dependent Schr{\"o}dinger equation is substantiated. In principle a single experiment should…
Photo- and electro-disintegration techniques have been traditionally used for studying giant dipole resonances and through them nuclear structure. Over a long period, detailed theoretical models for the giant dipole resonances were proposed…
John Archibald Wheeler was a theoretical physicist who worked on both down-to-earth projects and highly speculative ideas, and always emphasized the importance of experiment and observation, even when speculating wildly. His research and…
Three extraordinary physics discoveries were made from colonial India, which did not have any previous tradition of research in modern physics: Saha ionization equation (1920), Bose statistics (1924), Raman effect (1928). All the three…
This is a very short presentation regarding developments in the theory of nuclear many-body problems, as seen and experienced by the author during the past 60 years with particular emphasis on the contributions of Gerry Brown and his…
Modern techniques of the renormalization group (RG) combined with effective field theory (EFT) methods are revolutionizing nuclear many-body physics. In these lectures we will explore the motivation for RG in low-energy nuclear systems and…
This is a pedagogical overview of neutrino physics from the invention of neutrino by Pauli in 1930 to the precise measurement of neutrino mass and mixing parameters via neutrino oscillation experiments in recent years. I have tried to pitch…
From the synthesis and evolution of the elements to the celestial nuclear processes of stellar explosions and neutron star mergers, nuclear physics is the foundation of our understanding of the universe. After more than a century of…
At the beginning of the 20th century the classical electron theory (or, perhaps more appropriately, the classical electromagnetic mass theory) - the first physical theory that dared ask the question of what inertia and mass were - was…
The Rutherford planetary model of a proton-electron atom is modified. Besides the Coulomb interaction of the point electron with the proton, its strong Coulomb interaction with the physical vacuum as well as the magnetic interaction between…
The origin of the elements is a fascinating question that scientists have been trying to answer for the last seven decades. The formation of light elements in the primordial universe and heavier elements in astrophysical sources occurs…