Related papers: Introduction to Collection "Physics in a Mad World…
When a physicist says that a theory is fine-tuned, they mean that it must make a suspiciously precise assumption in order to explain a certain observation. This is evidence that the theory is deficient or incomplete. One particular case of…
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…
Soon after he proposed three classic observational tests for the general theory of relativity, Einstein realised that a consistent description of the universe as a whole provided another important challenge for the theory. In this essay, we…
A dangerously brief history of the developments of the main ideas in economics, as observed by a physicist, is given. This was published in 'Econophysics of Stock and Other Markets', Eds. A. Chatterjee, B. K. Chakrabarti, New Economic…
For a few seconds a gamma-ray burst (GRB) becomes the brightest object in the Universe, over-shining the rest of the Universe combined! Clearly this reflects extreme conditions that are fascinating and worth exploring. The recent discovery…
The recent literature of astronomy and cosmology has included a good many suggestions for "who first recognized the expansion of the universe?" with cases having been made for Lemaitre, Lundmark, de Sitter, Slipher, Shapley, Friedmann,…
Gigantic cosmological gamma-ray bursts have fallen into a dichotomy of long and short bursts, each with a very different origin. The discovery of an oddball burst calls for a rethink of that classification.
Observations of gravitationally lensed, high-mass stars at redshifts $\gtrsim1$ occasionally reveal spectral energy distributions that contain two components with different effective temperatures. Given that two separate stars are involved,…
Aristotle has split physics at the sphere of the moon; above this sphere there is no change except eternal spherical motion, below are two different kinds of motion: Natural motion (without specific cause) and enforced motion. In modern…
Using the Ernst formalism, a novel solution of vacuum general relativity (GR) was recently obtained [1], describing a Schwarzschild black hole (BH) immersed in a nonasymptotically flat rotating background, dubbed swirling universe, with the…
In offered work short historical excursus to the classical theory of light is presented: Grimaldi, Fermat, Newton, Huygens, Young, Fresnel, Fraunhofer, and Gauss. The ray analog of wave model of light and Huygens-Fresnel's elementary waves…
E. B. Gliner started his scientific career in 1963 at the age of 40. In 1965, when the existence of the cosmological constant $\lambda$ seemed unnecessary to most cosmologists, he renewed interest in the problem by emphasizing a material…
We critically examine the evidence available of the early ideas on the bending of light due to a gravitational attraction, which led to the concept of gravitational lenses, and attempt to present an undistorted historical perspective.…
The collective behavior of ensembles of atoms has been studied in-depth since the seminal paper of Dicke [R. H. Dicke, Phys. Rev. 93, 99 (1954)], where he demonstrated that a group of emitters in collective states is able to radiate with…
This historical essay describes the struggle to understand how the sun shines. The story begins with the disagreement between Kelvin and Darwin over the age of the sun in the middle of the 19th century and continues through the revelations…
Superfluidity is a remarkable manifestation of quantum mechanics at the macroscopic level. This article describes the history of its discovery, which took place at a particularly difficult period of the twentieth century. A special emphasis…
Gravitational lensing - the deflection of light rays by gravitating matter - has become a major tool in the armoury of the modern cosmologist. Proposed nearly a hundred years ago as a key feature of Einstein's theory of General Relativity,…
In the light of A.A. Friedman's conceptual analysis of the World of events as a mathematical model of the physical reality in his book "The World as Space and Time", a priory, innate interconnection of events belonging to one and the same…
This paper introduces the physics and philosophy of strange metals, which are characterized by unusual electrical and thermal properties that deviate from conventional metallic behaviour. The anomalous strange-metal behaviour discussed here…
Recently much attention has been paid to the discovery of Hubble's law: the linear relation between the rate of recession of the distant galaxies and distance to them. Though we now mention several names associated with this law instead of…