Related papers: The Atomic Hypothesis
Cosmoparticle physics offers the exciting challenge for the new Millenium to come to the true knowledge on the basic natural laws and on the way, they govern the creation and evolution of the Universe with all the forms of its present…
In this review article we provide an overview of the field of atomic structure of light atoms in strong magnetic fields. There is a very rich history of this field which dates back to the very birth of quantum mechanics. At various points…
The initial conditions of our Universe can be summarized on a single sheet of paper. Yet the Universe is full of complex structures today, such as stars, galaxies and groups of galaxies. In this review I describe the standard theoretical…
This is an elementary review of the history and physics of neutrinos. The story of the discovery of neutrino mass through neutrino oscillations is described in some detail. Experiments on solar neutrinos and atmospheric neutrinos played an…
Around year 2000 the centenary of Planck's thermal radiation formula awakened interest in the origins of quantum theory, traditionally traced back to the Planck's conference on 14 December 1900 at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. A lot of…
Ancient origins of a modern anthropic argument against cosmologies involving infinite series of past events are considered. It is shown that this argument - which in modern times has been put forward by distinguished cosmologists like Paul…
I give a brief overview of cosmic ray physics, highlighting some key questions and how they will be addressed by new experiments.
Observations made using large ground-based and space-borne telescopes have probed cosmic history all the way from the present-day to a time when the Universe was less than a tenth of its present age. Earlier on lies the remaining frontier,…
A simple, heuristic formula with parallels to the Drake Equation is introduced to help focus discussion on open questions for the origins of life in a planetary context. This approach indicates a number of areas where quantitative progress…
The early history of neutrino masses, mixing and oscillations is briefly reviewed.
In this paper I discuss the concept of time in physics. I consider the thermal time hypothesis and I claim that thermal clocks and atomic clocks measure different physical times, whereby thermal time and relativistic time are not compatible…
Nuclear theory today aims for a comprehensive theoretical framework that can describe all nuclei. I discuss recent progress in this pursuit and the associated challenges as we move forward.
We describe how cosmology has converged towards a beautiful model of the Universe: the Big Bang Universe. We praise this model, but show there is a dark side to it. This dark side is usually called ``the cosmological problems'': a set of…
While purely philosophical in the early times, and still very speculative at the beginning of the twentieth century, Cosmology has gradually entered into the realm of experimental science over the past eighty years. It has raised some…
There is very strong circumstantial evidence that there was an inflationary epoch very early in the history of the universe. In this lecture I will describe how we might be able to piece together some understanding of the dynamics during…
This is a review of the basic theoretical ideas of quantum criticality, and of their connection to numerous experiments on correlated electron compounds. A shortened, modified, and edited version appeared in Physics Today. This arxiv…
In 1919 A. Einstein suspected first that gravitational fields could play an essential role in the structure of elementary particles. In 1937, P.A.M. Dirac found a miraculous link between the properties of the visible Universe and elementary…
According to classical nucleation theory, a crystal grows from a small nucleus that already bears the symmetry of its end phase - but experiments with colloids now reveal that, from an amorphous precursor, crystallites with different…
We survey the development of probability from 1900, starting with Bachelier's theory of speculation. Fisher information appears in the theory of estimation. We touch on Brownian motion, and the Wiener integral. The Ito calculus, and its…
The concept of the space-time as emerging in the world phase transition, vs. a priori exiting, is put forward. The theory of gravity with two basic symmetries, the global affine one and the general covariance, is developed. Implications for…