Related papers: Introduction to Collection "Physics in a Mad World…
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…
From the perspective of the physics of complex systems (1) we deal with the current state of mod-ern physics including the crisis in physics demonstrated through its epistemological, psychological, economical as well as the social context;…
Einstein's early thoughts about superconductivity are discussed as a case study of how theoretical physics reacts to experimental findings that are incompatible with established theoretical notions. One such notion that is discussed is the…
Puzzles often give birth to the great discoveries, the false discoveries sometimes stimulate the exiting ideas in theoretical physics. The historical examples of both are described in Introduction and in section ``Cosmological Puzzles''.…
Einstein was in many ways like a detective on a mystery trail, though in his case he was on the trail of nature's mysteries and not some murder mystery! And like all good detectives he had a style. It consisted of taking facts that he knew…
This is the first complete English translation of Oratio De Meteoris Vi Electrica Ortis - seminal work of the great Russian polymath Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765). It was presented at the public meeting of the St.Petersburg Academy of…
Ronald Wilfrid Gurney is one of the lesser-known research students of the Cavendish Laboratory in the mid 1920s. Gurney made significant contributions to the application of quantum mechanics to problems related to tunneling of…
Since some experiments have found superluminality, we assume that the particles in the universe are divided into three classes: the subluminal, luminal and superluminal particles by the speed of light, their energy-momenum relations are E2…
The recognition that physical space (or space-time) is curved is a product of the general theory of relativity, such as dramatically shown by the 1919 solar eclipse measurements. However, the mathematical possibility of non-Euclidean…
According to Feynman, the universe consists of two parts - the system in which we are interested and the rest of the universe which our measurement process does not reach. Feynman then formulates the density matrix in terms of the…
In attempting to derive irreversible macroscopic thermodynamics from reversible microscopic dynamics, Boltzmann inadvertently smuggled in a premise that assumed the very irreversibility he was trying to prove: 'molecular chaos.' The program…
Einstein is usually revered as the father of special and general relativity. In this article I demonstrate that he is also the father of Solid State Physics, or even his broader version known as Condensed Matter Physics (including liquids).…
When visiting the Museum of Modern Art's special exhibit ''van Gogh and the Colors of the Night (New York, USA, 2008)'' I was impressed by the artist's effort to paint and write about landscapes and life scenes at night. At the same time a…
Of the first two relativistiv world models, only the one by de Sitter predicted redshifted spectra from far away astronomical objects. Slipher's redshifts therefore seemed to arbitrate against Einstein's model which made no such…
Although implicit in the discovery of the Schwarzschild solution 40 years earlier, the issues raised by the theory of what are now known as black holes were so unsettling to physicists of Einstein's generation that the subject remained in a…
In 1965 the Nobel Foundation honored Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, and Richard Feynman for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics and the consequences for the physics of elementary particles. In contrast to both of his…
About 400 years have passed since the great discoveries by Galilei, Kepler and Newton, but astronomy still remains an important source of discoveries in physics. They start with puzzles, with phenomena difficult to explain, and which in…
Chaos theory is a branch of classical physics, founded in the 1960s-70s, that studies systems whose solutions are sensitively dependent on their initial conditions. For many, it is surprising that chaos theory arrived so late. However,…
Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn (1851-1922) presented a model for the distribution of stars in space together with a dynamical interpretation in terms of an equilibrium between the gravitational field of the stars and their random motion and…
One century ago Viktor Hess carried out several balloon flights that led him to conclude that the penetrating radiation responsible for the discharge of electroscopes was of extraterrestrial origin. One century from the discovery of this…