Related papers: Georges Lema\^itre: Life, Science and Legacy
This text offers a personal account of the scientific legacy of two giants of mathematical physics at the turn of the Millenium and their heritage in Canada, their land of adoption.
Alastair Graham Walker Cameron was an astrophysicist and planetary scientist of broad interests and exceptional originality. A founder of the field of nuclear astrophysics, he developed the theoretical understanding of the chemical…
Randomness is an unavoidable notion in discussing quantum physics, and this may trigger the curiosity to know more of its cultural history. This text is an invitation to explore the position on the matter of Thomas Aquinas, one of the most…
In 1919 A. Einstein suspected first that gravitational fields could play an essential role in the structure of elementary particles. In 1937, P.A.M. Dirac found a miraculous link between the properties of the visible Universe and elementary…
Random sampling in high dimensions has successfully been applied to phenomena as diverse as nuclear resonances, neural networks and black hole evaporation. Here we revisit an elegant argument by the British physicist Dennis Sciama, which…
This agile small "book" (in Italian) is an introduction to the life and work of Ettore Majorana, the brightest Italian theoretical physicist of the XX century, regarded by Enrico Fermi as the best theoretician of his time in the world. It…
In 1923 Louis de Broglie (1892-1987) discovered the material waves and six years later received the Nobel price for this discovery. Apart these well known facts this French physicist nevertheless seems to be forgotten. Details of his life…
The present paper deals with the life and some aspects of the scientific contributions of the mathematician Ren\'e Gateaux, killed during World War 1 at the age of 25. Though he died very young, he left interesting results in functional…
One of the most important philosophers in history, the German Friedrich Nietzsche, is almost ignored by physicists. This author who declared the death of God in the 19th century was a science enthusiast, especially in the second period of…
Based on historical facts, revisited from a present-day perspective, and on the documented opinions of the scientists involved in the discovery themselves, strong arguments are given in favor of a proposal to include prominent astronomer…
This review describes the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965 and its impact on cosmology in the 50 years that followed. This discovery has established the Big Bang model of the Universe and the analysis of its…
In his treatise on light, written in about 1225, Robert Grosseteste describes a cosmological model in which the Universe is created in a big-bang like explosion and subsequent condensation. He postulates that the fundamental coupling of…
This essay provides concise biographical information about eight physicists, astronomers, astrophysicists, and cosmologists from the twentieth century. The portrayed scientists are Hermann Bondi (1919-2005), Charles L. Critchfield…
In this talk I shall start by describing how we set about and carried out the work which led to the publication of B2FH in 1957. I then shall try and relate this work and the circumstances that surrounded it to the larger problem of the…
Work of Lev Landau had a profound impact on the physics in 20th century. Landau had created the paradigms that had framed the conversations on the outstanding problems in physics for decades. He has laid the foundations for our…
This article is dedicated to the memory of Dennis Sciama. It revisits a series of issues to which he devoted much time and effort, regarding the relationship between local physics and the large scale structure of the universe - in…
James Philip Elliott, one of the towering figures of nuclear physics of the second half of the twentieth century, died on the 21st of October 2008. Obituaries appeared in the British press but relatively little attention was paid by the…
I give an epistemological analysis of the developments of relativistic cosmology from 1917 to 1966, based on the seminal articles by Einstein, de Sitter, Friedmann, Lemaitre, Hubble, Gamow and other historical figures of the field. It…
One evening, a father tells his three daughters, Luc\'ia, In\'es, and Ana, a bedtime story unlike any other. It is a tale of four silent architects ($c$, $\hbar$, $G$, and $\Lambda$) whose presence or absence shapes the very fabric of…
Georges Lemaitre introduced the term "phoenix universe" to describe an oscillatory cosmology with alternating periods of gravitational collapse and expansion. This model is ruled out observationally because it requires a supercritical mass…