Related papers: Introduction to Collection "Physics in a Mad World…
Exactly one hundred years ago, in May 1922, Alexander Friedmann discovered that General Relativity (GR) predicts non-stationary Universe. His equation describing the evolution of the Universe is now named after him. In this paper we briefly…
This article is a summary of a talk about Richard Feynman, given at a conference Polymaths across the Eras organized in November 2023 by the St Cross Centre for the History and Philosophy of Physics (HAPP) in Oxford. It describes Feynman as…
This year we are celebrating 101 years since the discovery of cosmic rays. They are whizzing all around the Universe, and they occur at very different energies, including the highest particle energies that exist. However, theory predicts an…
More than a century ago, Albert Einstein presented his general theory of gravitation (GR) to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. One of the predictions of the theory is that not only particles and objects with mass, but also the quanta of…
The coherence of the interaction of light with a collisionless gas (Einstein 1917) founds the theory of gas lasers. It is, for the understanding of universe, a simpler and more powerful tool than the big bang which requires questionable…
We retrace the first steps towards understanding neutrinos, particles predicted by Pauli in 1930 to avoid a supposed violation of time-translation symmetry. Despite the tendency to reduce the whole story to his intuition and the skill of…
Plutarchus, circa 100 AD, in his early book on "astrophysics" --in which he exposed, in a sense, a general theory of gravitation-- wrote the noticeable passage: <<The Moon gets the guarantee of not falling down just from its motion and from…
This essay tells briefly of the life and work of one of the most successful scientists originating from a Balkan settlement whose name and popularity have greatly exceeded its realm. The word is of a discovery during WWII of the…
The light curves (time series of the radiated energy) of most large amplitude, pulsating stars such as the well known Cepheid stars are regular. However, a smaller group of variable stars that are located next to them in the Hertzsprung-…
After a brief introduction to the sixteenth and seventeenth century views of the Universe and the nineteenth century paradox of Olbers, we start the history of the cosmic expansion with Hubble's epochal discovery of the recession velocities…
A glorious achievement of twentieth century Physics is the identification of the building blocks of nature. A related triumph a deep understanding of the forces of interaction. In particular, it has been possible to understand the four…
Detailed observations of the temperature fluctuations in the microwave background radiation indicate that we live in an open universe. From the size of these fluctuations it is concluded that the geometry of the universe is quite close to…
The first Edition of this book was released in 2000, just before the symposium ``Thirty Years of Supersymmetry'' was held at the William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute (FTPI) of the University of Minnesota. Founders and trailblazers…
The life of Ernst Ising and the steps to solving the model named after him are reported in parallel. Wilhelm Lenz suggested his student Ernst Ising to explain the existence of ferromagnetism on the basis of his publication in 1920. The…
For over a century physicists have sought a mathematical theory that unites the dual, wave and corpuscle, behaviors that light exhibits. In the early twentieth century H. Bateman was studying a solution that uses wave functions with…
One of the deepest unsolved puzzles of subatomic physics is why Nature prefers the left particles to the right ones. Mirror matter is an attempt to understand this mystery by assuming the existence of a "parallel''world where this…
General Relativity (GR) was created in November 1915 and since its creation and up to now this theory has undergone many tests. The first realistic cosmological models were proposed in the works of Friedman, written in the 1920s. For a long…
This volume covers one of the most thrilling two-year periods in twentieth-century physics, as matrix mechanics - developed chiefly by W. Heisenberg, M. Born, and P. Jordan - and wave mechanics - developed by E. Schr\"odinger - supplanted…
Albert Einstein visited Spain only once, precisely one hundred years ago. The circumstances, of a very different kind, of this visit will be explained here. In special, some important events happened to Einstein during that period, which,…
I observe that, as the physics side of the OPERA-anomaly story is apparently unfolding, there can still be motivation for philosophy of science to analyze the six months of madness physicists spent chasing the dream of a new…