Related papers: Reflections on Gibbs: From Statistical Physics to …
The suggestion that particles of the same kind may be indistinguishable in a fundamental sense, even so that challenges to traditional notions of individuality and identity may arise, has first come up in the context of classical…
Generalization through novel interpretations of the inner logic of the century-old Gibbs' statistical thermodynamics is presented: i) Identifying $k_B\to 0$ as classical energetics, one directly derives a pair of thermodynamic variational…
While collecting some personal memories about Julius Wess, I briefly describe some aspects of my recent work on many particle quantum mechanics and second quantization on noncommutative spaces obtained by twisting, and their connection to…
I show that with the discovery of the Higgs boson we have entered a new phase of our understanding of nature. This leads us towards a paradigm shift in the search for possible new physics, away from major extensions like supersymmetry…
The concept of classical indistinguishability is analyzed and defended against a number of well-known criticisms, with particular attention to the Gibbs' paradox. Granted that it is as much at home in classical as in quantum statistical…
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…
Gibbs measure is one of the central objects of the modern probability, mathematical statistical physics and euclidean quantum field theory. Here we define and study its natural generalization for the case when the space, where the random…
The image of physics is connected with simple "mechanical" deterministic events: that an apple always falls down, that force equals mass times acceleleration. Indeed, applications of such concept to social or historical problems go back two…
Gibbsian statistical mechanics (GSM) is the most widely used version of statistical mechanics among working physicists. Yet a closer look at GSM reveals that it is unclear what the theory actually says and how it bears on experimental…
Professor Tom Kibble was an internationally-renowned theoretical physicist whose contributions to theoretical physics range from the theory of elementary particles to modern early-universe cosmology. The unifying theme behind all his work…
I give a short commentary on a seminal article by T W B Kibble in 1976, "Topology of cosmic domains and strings".
The American physicist Robert Dicke (1916-1997) is primarily known for his important contributions to gravitation, cosmology, and microwave physics. Much less known is his work in geophysics and related areas of the earth sciences in which…
In the framework of Gibbs statistical theory, the issue of the distribution of particle sizes forming the statistical system and the moments of this distribution are considered. This task is relevant for a wide variety of applications. The…
The unification of gravity with the three other forces has been an important goal of physics for some time now, because a quantum theory of gravity is necessary to explain the universe at its earliest moments. Its pursuit has largely…
A recent paper by Gislason published in Am. J. Phys. deals with the celebrated example of the so-called "adiabatic piston", a system involving two ideal gases contained in a horizontal cylinder and separated by an insulating piston that…
The intersection of thermodynamics, quantum theory and gravity has revealed many profound insights, all the while posing new puzzles. In this article, we discuss an extension of equilibrium statistical mechanics and thermodynamics…
In this paper, I aim to clarify the unconscious ideologies and attitudes held by physicists through Prigogine's work. Prigogine was an outstanding chemist and physicist who made significant contributions to the development of…
The billiard problem of statistical physics is considered in a new geometric approach with a symmetric phase space. The structure and topological features of typical billiard phase portrait are defined. The connection between geometric,…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
Jacob Bekenstein's pioneering contributions to the foundations of Gravity cover a broad range of scales, from Black Holes to the entire Universe. He is well known as the father of Black Hole Thermodynamics and the inventor of the TeVeS…