Related papers: Quantization of the Atom plus Attempting to Answer…
A physically real wave associated with any moving particle and travelling in a surrounding material medium was introduced by Louis de Broglie in a series of short notes in 1923 and in a more complete form in his thesis defended in Paris on…
In the post-Maxwellian era, sensing that the tide of discoveries in electromagnetim indicated a decline of the mechanical view, Einstein replaced Newton's three absolutes -- space, time and mass, with a single one, the velocity of light.…
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 findings for which Aage Bohr and Ben R. Mottelson became co-winners of the 1975 Nobel prize in physics provided the basis for a comprehensive and operative answer to the central problem in the study of the nuclear structure, namely the…
We discuss, from a historiographical point of view, which was the degree of certainty that the physicists directly involved in the birth of Quantum Mechanics (Heisenberg, Born, Jordan, Dirac and Schr\"odinger) gave to the atomistic…
A scheme for entangling distant atoms is realized, as proposed in the seminal paper by Cabrillo et al. [Phys. Rev. A 59, 1025 (1999)]. The protocol is based on quantum interference and detection of a single photon scattered from two…
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…
Muons are a fascinating probe to study nuclear properties. Muonic atoms can easily be formed by stopping negative muons inside a material. The muon is subsequently captured by the nucleus and, due to its much higher mass compared to the…
Transitions between low-lying electron states in atoms of heavy elements lead to electromagnetic radiation with discrete energies between about 0.1~keV and 100~keV (x rays) that are characteristic of the element. Moseley's law --- an…
Much progress has been made in the last few decades in developing the necessary mathematics for understanding the full implications of the quantum-mechanical many-body problem and why the material world appears to be as stable as it is…
The atomic bomb uses fission of heavy elements to produce a large amount of energy. It was designed and deployed during World War II by the United States military. The first test of an atomic bomb occurred in July of 1945 in New Mexico and…
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…
Schroedinger's equation gave early quantum theory a visual language that looked like physics again: a wave evolving by a linear differential equation. This essay argues that the same success also seeded a recurring impulse to keep quantum…
Kepler's observation of comets tails initiated the research on the radiation pressure of celestial objects and 250 years later they found new incarnation after the Maxwell's equations were formulated to describe a plethora of light-matter…
In 1995, a team of physicists from the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk was able to observe the splitting of a photon in the Coulomb field of an atomic nucleus for the first time, and reported the preliminary results of…
Atomism is the view that everything is composed of atoms. The view within the framework of the contemporary formal approach is expressed on the ground of mereology with the use of the primitive notion of being a part as every object has at…
We review here the main contributions of Einstein to the quantum theory. To put them in perspective we first give an account of Physics as it was before him. It is followed by a brief account of the problem of black body radiation which…
The origin of quantum physics was the discovery of the base unit of electromagnetic action $h$ by Max Planck in 1900 when he analyzed the experimental results of the black body radiation. This permitted Albert Einstein a few years later to…
In the year 1900 Max Planck was led by experimental observations to propose a strange formula for the intensity as a function of frequency for light emitted by a cavity. It relied on peculiar properties to be obeyed by the emitters and…
Isaac Newton's book 'Opticks' from the 18th century includes several hypotheses on the structure of matter. Most of the hypotheses were confirmed during the 19th and 20th centuries at the scale of atoms and molecules. Conflicts appear…