Related papers: La leggenda del quanto centenario
While complex numbers are essential in mathematics, they are not needed to describe physical experiments, expressed in terms of probabilities, hence real numbers. Physics however aims to explain, rather than describe, experiments through…
Starting with Einstein's famous papers of 1905, we review some of the ensuing developments and their impact on present-day physics. We attempt to cover topics that are of interest to historians and philosophers of science as well as to…
According to De Broglie's idea of analogy, the relation between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics is similar to that between wave optics and geometric optics, we have given the quantum equation of the gravitational field intensity…
When a mountaineer is ascending one of the great peaks of the Himalayas she knows that an entirely new vista awaits her at the top, whose ramifications will be known only after she gets there. Her immediate goal though, is to tackle the…
We survey the development of probability from 1900, starting with Bachelier's theory of speculation. Fisher information appears in the theory of estimation. We touch on Brownian motion, and the Wiener integral. The Ito calculus, and its…
Quantum Mechanics (QM) has faced deep controversies and debates since its origin when Werner Heisenberg proposed the first mathematical formalism capable to operationally account for what had been recently discovered as the new field of…
In a comparison of the principles of special relativity and of quantum mechanics, the former theory is marked by its relative economy and apparent explanatory simplicity. A number of theorists have thus been led to search for a small number…
In 1924, Satyendra Nath Bose's pioneering work laid the foundation for Bose-Einstein statistics, which describes particles with integral spins. His derivation of Planck's law for blackbody radiation bypassed classical assumptions, relying…
In this work we address the contemporary debate about quantum individuality expressed as an opposition between those who, like D\'ecio Krause, defend the reference of the theory to "non-individual particles", and those like Dennis Dieks,…
The main ideas behind developments in the theory and technology of quantum computation were formulated in the late 1970s and early 1980s by two physicists in the West and a mathematician in the former Soviet Union. It is not generally known…
Historically, Ehrenfest's theorem (1927) is the first one which shows that classical physics can emerge from quantum physics as a kind of approximation. We recall the theorem in its original form. Next, we highlight its generalizations to…
In modern physics courses the idea of photon has been teaching through from the einsteinian formulation based on the photoelectric effect. Einstein's photon concept allow the quantization of the electromagnetic field, but does not dwell on…
Quantum thermodynamics addresses the emergence of thermodynamical laws from quantum mechanics. The link is based on the intimate connection of quantum thermodynamics with the theory of open quantum systems. Quantum mechanics inserts…
The physics of the 20th Century is governed by two pillars, Einstein's relativity principle and the quantum principle. At the beginning of the 21st Century, it becomes clear that there exist the smallest units of matter, such as electrons,…
We start from classical general relativity coupled to matter fields. Each configuration variable and its conjugate momentum, as also space-time points, are raised to the status of matrices [equivalently operators]. These matrices obey a…
The cosmological constant problem is principally concerned with trying to understand how the zero-point energy of quantum fields contributes to gravity. Here we take the approach that by addressing a fundamental unresolved issue in quantum…
Planck's constant was introduced as a fundamental scale in the early history of quantum mechanics. We find a modern approach where Planck's constant is absent: it is unobservable except as a constant of human convention. Despite long…
We trace the historical appearance of Planck's constant in physics, and we note that initially the constant did not appear in connection with quanta. Furthermore, we emphasize that Planck's constant can appear in both classical and quantum…
Within a theory of the existing fundamental length on the order of Planck's a high-energy deformation of the General Relativity for the space with horizon has been constructed. On this basis, Markov's work of the early eighties of the last…
The experience from Quantum Information has lead us to look at Quantum Theory (QT) and the whole Physics from a different angle. The information-theoretical paradigm---"It from Bit'---prophesied by John Archibald Wheeler is relentlessly…