Related papers: Introduction to Collection "Physics in a Mad World…
For millennia, mankind has been fascinated by the marvel of the starry night sky. Yet, a proper scientific understanding of how stars form, shine, and die is a relatively recent achievement, made possible by the interplay of different…
The Sun has been observed through a telescope for four centuries. However, its study made a prodigious leap at the end of the nineteenth century with the appearance of photography and spectroscopy, then at the beginning of the following…
The properties of light in the presence of electromagnetic and gravitational fields are compared. Once one takes account of the fact that clock rates vary with distance from a massive object, it is argued that in an absolute sense light…
During the last century, with the development of modern physics in such diverse fields as thermodynamics, statistical physics, and nuclear and particle physics, the basic principles of the evolution of stars have been successfully well…
During the 1920s and 1930s, Italian physicists established strong relationships with scientists from other European countries and the United States. The career of Bruno Rossi, a leading personality in the study of cosmic rays and an Italian…
The reader surely knows what particles physics is about: finding building blocks of nature that appear elementary at a given time and study their interactions - so why in the world this essay? The problem is how to arrive at a fundamental…
There is general agreement that the universe began with an "explosion" of matter and energy at a "singularity", the "Big Bang". This paper analyses the mechanics of that beginning and two alternative theories related to it: - The…
The inflationary hot big bang model of cosmology explains the birth of the universe, the appearance of atoms and that of large-scale structures, altogether omitting any reference to the living world. Yet, like the physical world, the living…
We review the main scientific pictures of the universe developed from ancient times to Albert Einstein and underline that all of them treated the universe as a stationary system with unchanged physical properties. In contrast to this, 100…
Supersymmetry is a theme with many facets that has dominated much of high energy physics over the past decades. In this contribution I present a very personal perspective on these developments, which has also been shaped in an important way…
The objective reality of the Earth's motion about the Sun was finally proven observationally by Bradley (1727) when he correctly explained the ~20'' annual, elliptical motions of stars as being due to aberration of starlight caused by the…
The physics of the mysterious and stealthy neutrino is at the heart of many phenomena in the cosmos. These particles interact with matter and with each other through the aptly named weak interaction. At typical astrophysical energies the…
Brief recollections of two giants of physics, their origins, similarities and differences.
During the 17th century the idea of an orbiting and rotating Earth became increasingly popular, but opponents of this view continued to point out that the theory had observable consequences that had never, in fact, been observed. Why, for…
Light rays received on earth from distant stars show redshift, being attributed conventionally to the well-known Doppler-effect of wave dynamics. The present study concludes that cosmic redshift rather is an effect of the quantum mechanical…
In 1971 Feynman, Kislinger and Ravndal [1] proposed Lorentz-invariant differential equation capable to describe relativistic particle with mass and internal space-time structure. By making use of new variables that differentiate between…
In 1977, G\'erard Toulouse has proposed a new concept termed as "frustration" in spin systems. Using this definition, several frustrated models have been created and studied, among them we can mention the Villain's model, the fully…
Supersymmetry plays a fundamental role in the radiative stability of many inflationary models. Spontaneous breaking of the symmetry inevitably leads to fields with masses of order the Hubble scale during inflation. When these fields couple…
This new book by cosmologists Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes is another entry in the long list of cosmology-centered physics books intended for a large audience. While many such books aim at advancing a novel scientific theory, A…
From the perspective of the physics of complex systems (1) we deal with the current state of modern physics including the crisis in physics demonstrated through its epistemological, psychological, economical as well as the social context;…