Related papers: Introduction to Collection "Physics in a Mad World…
Asteroseismology of massive stars has recently begun a revolution thanks to high-precision time series photometry from space telescopes. This has allowed accurate and robust constraints on interior physical processes, such as mixing and…
Physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard P. Feynman once remarked ``We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality,…
The thought experiment (called the clock paradox or the twin paradox)proposed by Langevin in 1911 of two observers, one staying on Earth and the other making a trip toward a star with a velocity near the light velocity is very well known…
The discovery of the interstellar medium and the early work of Lyman Spitzer, Jr. are reviewed here in the context of the remarkable observation in the early 1950's that star formation continues in the present age. Prior to this…
Ideological considerations have always influenced science, but rarely as directly and massively as in the Soviet Union during the early Cold War period. Cosmology was among the sciences that became heavily politicized and forced to conform…
Can the laws of physics be unified. One of the most puzzling challenges is to reconcile physics and chemistry, where molecular physics meets condensed-matter physics, resulting from the scaling effect and dynamic fluctuation of glassy…
Nearly 4 years ago, two teams of observational astronomers reported that high-redshift Type Ia supernovae are fainter than expected in a decelerating or freely coasting universe. The radical conclusion that the universe has been…
While there are many different mechanisms which have been proposed to understand the physics behind light induced ``superconductivity", what seems to be common to the class of materials in which this is observed are strong pairing…
Curiously, our Universe was born in a low entropy state, with abundant free energy to power stars and life. The form that this free energy takes is usually thought to be gravitational: the Universe is almost perfectly smooth, and so can…
Arising out of an attempt at a new foundations of mathematics, in which relations are more primitive than sets, and out of the theoretical physicists' concept of underlying causes of empirical phenomena, the idea of a purely mathematical…
From the interaction of physics and astrophysics we are witnessing in these years a splendid synthesis of theoretical, experimental and observational results originating from three fundametal physical processes. They were originally…
As first discovered by Choptuik, the black hole threshold in the space of initial data for general relativity shows both surprising structure and surprising simplicity. Universality, power-law scaling of the black hole mass, and scale…
Mirror matter is predicted to exist if parity (i.e. left-right symmetry) is a symmetry of nature. Remarkably mirror matter is capable of simply explaining a large number of contemporary puzzles in astrophysics and particle physics…
The 1950s-- and perhaps also the 1960s-- were very special times for the development of solid-state/condensed-matter physics. The University of Illinois at Urbana was at the center of these activities. In areas like NMR and…
It is commonly known that the steady-state model of the universe was proposed and championed in a series of influential papers around mid-twenty century by Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi, and Thomas Gold. In contrast it is little known that,…
In the year 1924, a paper by Carl Wirtz appeared in Astronomische Nachrichten, entitled 'De Sitter's cosmology and the radial motion of spiral galaxies'. This paper and its author remained largely unnoticed by the community, but it seems to…
The transition between the nearly smooth initial state of the Universe and its clumpy state today occurred during the epoch when the first stars and low-luminosity quasars formed. For Cold Dark Matter cosmologies, the radiation produced by…
Mirror symmetry is a plausible candidate for a fundamental symmetry of particle interactions which can be exactly conserved if a set of mirror particles exist. The properties of the mirror particles seem to provide an excellent candidate to…
By the time, in 1937, the Swiss astronomer Zwicky measured the velocity dispersion of the Coma cluster of galaxies, astronomers somehow got acquainted with the idea that the universe is filled by some kind of dark matter. After almost a…
Magnetars are the strongest magnets in the present universe and the combination of extreme magnetic field, gravity and density makes them unique laboratories to probe current physical theories (from quantum electrodynamics to general…