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This paper offers an alternative approach to discussing both the principle of relativity and the derivation of the Lorentz transformations. This approach uses the idea that there may not be a preferred inertial frame through a privileged…
Are we smarter now than Socrates was in his time? Society as a whole certainly enjoys a higher degree of education, but humans as a species probably don't get intrinsically smarter with time. Our knowledge base, however, continues to grow…
I show that with the discovery of the Higgs boson we have entered a new phase of our understanding of nature. This leads us towards a paradigm shift in the search for possible new physics, away from major extensions like supersymmetry…
Even though there has been a tremendous amount of research done in how to help students learn physics, students are still coming away missing a crucial piece of the puzzle: why bother with physics? Students learn fundamental laws and how to…
Einstein's general theory of relativity is the standard theory of gravity, especially where the needs of astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology and fundamental physics are concerned. As such, this theory is used for many practical purposes…
Physics was in crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century because the newborn Maxwell's electromagnetism defied mechanistic preconceptions. Albert Einstein understood that the solution to the crisis required an audacious reworking of…
Wigner's 1939 paper on representations of the inhomogeneous Lorentz group is one of the most fundamental papers in physics. Wigner maintained his passion for this subject throughout his life. In this report, I will review the papers which…
The development of both special and general relativity is accomplished in a series of 6 papers using a simple approach. The purpose is to explain the how and why of relativity to a broad public, and to be useful for students of physics by…
The need for revolution in modern physics is a well known and often broached subject, however, the precision and success of current models narrows the possible changes to such a great degree that there appears to be no major change…
This is mainly a lecture note taken by myself following Weinberg's book, but also contains some corrections to the abuse of mathematical treatment. This article discusses projective unitary representations of Poincare group on the single…
We develop some formalism which is very general Feynman path integral in the case of the action which is allowed to be complex. The major point is that the effect of the imaginary part of the action (mainly) is to determine which solution…
These lecture notes cover the important developments in histories approach to quantum mechanics with overall content and emphasis somewhat different from other reviews and books on the subject.The idea of Houtappel, Van Dam and Wigner of…
From data in the present we can predict the future and retrodict the past. These predictions and retrodictions are for histories -- most simply time sequences of events. Quantum mechanics gives probabilities for individual histories in a…
This contribution tries to highlight the importance of Minkowski's ``Raum und Zeit'' lecture in a ``negative'' way, where {\it negative} is taken in the photographic sense of reversing lights and shades. Indeed, we focus on the ``shades''…
We discuss pedagogical problems associated with the conventional approach in teaching relativity and the potential value of "Lorentzian route to relativity" for addressing these pedagogical problems. We think that Lorentzian approach may be…
In his Autobiographical Notes, Einstein mentioned that on his road to the final theory of general relativity it was a major difficulty to accustom himself to the idea that coordinates need not possess an immediate physical meaning in terms…
There has been a recent spate of essays defending presentism, the view in the metaphysics of time according to which all and only present events or entities exist. What is particularly striking about this resurgence is that it takes place…
A paradox associated with the astrophysical Poynting-Robertson effect is presented. The paradox arises when relativity theory and Mie's solution of Maxwell's equations are confronted with the statements on the Poynting-Robertson effect.…
As Lanzagorta and Crowder have shown in their Comment [Phys. Rev. A 96, 026101 (2017)], the linear application of the Wigner rotations to the quantum state of two massive relativistic particles does not entail the instantaneous transmission…
Gravitation has posed a puzzle and a problem for many decades. Attempts to unify it with other fundamental interactions have failed. These problems and puzzles have been underscored by the likes of Witten and Weinberg. We survey this and…