Related papers: Reflections on Gibbs: From Statistical Physics to …
This is a popular lecture about the history of gravitational wave research. Without any doubt, the discovery of gravitational waves is the most important event in the physics of the last decade along with the discovery of the Higgs boson.…
Explaining quantum many-body dynamics is a long-held goal of physics. A rigorous operator algebraic theory of dynamics in locally interacting systems in any dimension is provided here in terms of time-dependent equilibrium (Gibbs)…
In spite of the great success of LHC experiments, we do not know whether the discovered "standard model-like" Higgs particle is really what the standard model predicts or a particle some new physics has in its low energy effective theory.…
The first-passage time is proposed as an independent thermodynamic parameter of the statistical distribution that generalizes the Gibbs distribution. The theory does not include the determination of the first passage statistics itself. A…
Understanding the nature of time remains a key unsolved problem in science. Newton in the Principia asserted an absolute universal time that {\it `flows equably'}. Hamilton then proposed a mathematical unification of space and time within…
This is the first part of an oral history interview on the lifelong involvement of Joel Lebowitz in the development of statistical mechanics. Here the covered topics include the formative years, which overlapped the tragic period of Nazi…
The development of a mathematics for living systems is one of the most challenging prospects of this century. The search began with the pioneering contribution of Ilia Prigogine, who developed methods from statistical physics to describe…
The dissemination of natural philosophy in the 18th-century, which was based primarily on Newton's pioneering work in mechanics, optics and astrophysics, is presented as seen through a remarkable textbook written by a little known Irish…
The Widom-Rowlinson model is an equilibrium model for point particles in Euclidean space. It has a repulsive interaction between particles of different colors, and shows a phase-transition at high intensity. Natural versions of the model…
We discuss how developments in physics often imply in the need that spacetime acquires an increasingly richer and complex structure. General Relativity was the first theory to show us the way to connect space and time with the physical…
In this paper, we study a class of multilinear Gibbs measures with Hamiltonian given by a generalized $\mathrm{U}$-statistic and with a general base measure. Expressing the asymptotic free energy as an optimization problem over a space of…
We discuss recent results of the replica approach to statistical mechanics of a single classical particle placed in a random N(>>1)-dimensional Gaussian landscape. The particular attention is paid to the case of landscapes with…
Detlef D\"urr (1951-2021) was a theoretical and mathematical physicist who worked particularly on the foundations of quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, and statistical mechanics. This piece is a rather personal look back at him and his…
Since the very early days of quantum theory there have been numerous attempts to interpret quantum mechanics as a statistical theory. This is equivalent to describing quantum states and ensembles together with their dynamics entirely in…
This is the English version of my inaugural lecture at Coll\`ege de France in 2021, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxktplKMhKU. I reflect on the difficulty of multi-disciplinary research, which often hinges of unexpected…
Since I first became enthralled with physics as a teenager, I've been intrigued by the philosophical aspects of the discipline. As I approached the end of my career as an experimental physicist and observational astronomer (I'm now…
A result from Dodd and Gibbs[1] for the second virial coefficient of particles in 1 dimension, subject to delta-function interactions, has been obtained by direct integration of the wave functions. It is shown that this result can be…
Introducing the Boltzmann distribution very early in a statistical thermodynamics course (in the spirit of Feynmann) has many didactic advantages, in particular that of easily deriving the Gibbs entropy formula. In this note, a short…
Theories of fundamental physics as well as cosmology must ultimately not only account for the structure and evolution of the universe and the physics of fundamental interactions, but also lead to an understanding of why this particular…
This paper is a top down historical perspective on the several phases in the development of probability from its prehistoric origins to its modern day evolution, as one of the key methodologies in artificial intelligence, data science, and…