Related papers: La leggenda del quanto centenario
At this beginning of the 21st century, the situation of physics is not without analogy with that which prevailed a hundred years ago, with the outset of the double scientific revolution of relativity and quanta. On the one hand, recent…
In this brief note I address the question not frequently asked, namely, why did it take two decades between Einstein's first proposal of photons and derivation of the full Planck formula from first principles of Statistical Mechanics,…
The year 2025 marked the centennial of quantum mechanics, inaugurated by Heisenberg's matrix formulation and the foundational contributions of Pauli, Schrodinger, and Dirac. Concurrently, 2026 marks the centennial of the Klein - Gordon…
We trace the evolution of quantization conditions from Planck's introduction of a new fundamental constant (h) in his treatment of blackbody radiation in 1900 to Heisenberg's interpretation of the commutation relations of modern quantum…
In the context of our recently developed emergent quantum mechanics, and, in particular, based on an assumed sub-quantum thermodynamics, the necessity of energy quantization as originally postulated by Max Planck is explained by means of…
It is widely hoped that quantum gravity will shed light on the question of the origin of time in physics. The currently dominant approaches to a candidate quantum theory of gravity have naturally evolved from general relativity, on the one…
This is an English (annotated) translation of the German paper by Max Planck (1943) about "The history of the discovery of the physical quantum of action"
A historical overview is given on the basic results which appeared by the year 1926 concerning Einstein's fluctuation formula of black-body radiation, in the context of light-quanta and wave-particle duality. On the basis of the original…
The tension, if not outright inconsistency, between quantum physics and general relativity is one of the great problems facing physics at the turn of the millennium. Most often, the problems arising in merging Einstein gravity and quantum…
Einstein is considered by many as the father of quantum physics in some sense. Yet there is an unshakable view that he was wrong on quantum physics. Although it may be a subject of considerable debate, the core of his allegedly wrong…
We begin by discussing the history of quantum logic, dividing it into three eras or lives. The first life has to do with Birkhoff and von Neumann's algebraic approach in the 1930's. The second life has to do with attempt to understand…
Late in October 1911, eighteen leading scientists from all over Europe met to the first of a famous sequence of Solvay conferences in Brussels. This historical meeting was mainly devoted to "The Theory of Radiation and the Quanta", at a…
Quantum mechanics has enjoyed a multitude of successes since its formulation in the early twentieth century. At the same time, it has generated puzzles that persist to this day. These puzzles have inspired a large literature in physics and…
The special theory of relativity does not predict the existence of photons (quanta of electromagnetic radiation). However, it is demonstrated here that it follows from the special theory of relativity that if photons do exist---and we know…
In a fundamental formulation of the quantum mechanics of a closed system such as the universe as a whole, three forms of information are needed to make predictions for the probabilities of alternative time histories of the closed system .…
In 1966, the Brazilian physicist Klaus Tausk circulated a preprint from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, in Trieste, criticizing the theory put forward by Daneri, Loinger & Prosperi on the measurement problem in quantum…
Although implicit in the discovery of the Schwarzschild solution 40 years earlier, the issues raised by the theory of what are now known as black holes were so unsettling to physicists of Einstein's generation that the subject remained in a…
Much progress has been made in the last few decades in developing the necessary mathematics for understanding the full implications of the quantum-mechanical many-body problem and why the material world appears to be as stable as it is…
Modern attempts to understand light go back to Newton who considered light to be particles, the so called corpuscular theory, and the other school of Huygens, Young and others. Huygens and Young viewpoint emphasised the wave property. This…
The usual formulation of quantum theory is rather abstract. In recent work I have shown that we can, nevertheless, obtain quantum theory from five reasonable axioms. Four of these axioms are obviously consistent with both classical…