Related papers: Memories of a Theoretical Physicist
I describe aspects of my life in physics: the name I publish under, great physicists I have known, how I got into quantum foundations, what role I've played in it. My form is autobiographical, but my personal experience may illustrate what…
Since I first became enthralled with physics as a teenager, I've been intrigued by the philosophical aspects of the discipline. As I approached the end of my career as an experimental physicist and observational astronomer (I'm now…
This article gives a sketch of teachers and colleagues who have had strong influence on my becoming a particle physicist.
A short autobiography written for a centennial party.
I would like to thank Solar Physics colleagues for asking me to write this chapter on my professional life. My main interest has always been focused on the Sun, our star, from the heating of the corona, to the dynamics of prominences and…
This invited memoir looks back on my scientific career that straddles the solar and stellar branches of astrophysics, with sprinklings of historical context and personal opinion. Except for a description of my life up to my Ph.D. phase, the…
This is a Concluding Talk, not a Summary of the FPCP 2011 Conference. I will first make some comments on the status and the prospects of particle physics and then review some of the highlights that particularly impressed me at this…
The present document is an excerpt of an essay that I wrote as part of my application material to graduate school in Computer Science (with a focus on Artificial Intelligence), in 1986. I was not invited by any of the schools that received…
Over the years many have written biographies of Einstein. They all based their biographies on primary sources, archival material: memories and letters of people who were in contact with Einstein, Einstein's own recollections; interviews…
The career and accomplishments of Julian Schwinger, who shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1965, have been reviewed in numerous books and articles. For this reason these Memories, which seek to convey a sense of Schwinger's remarkable…
Steven Weinberg productive scientific life teaches us many things, one of the most important of which is the power of his example. This essay contains personal reminiscences and a speculation about gravitational wave propagation based on…
[Taken from the "README" in the book] My goal with this book is to provide some kind of bridge for mathematics between the high-school-level and college-level for physics students. From my perspective, our job as physicists is to observe…
In this investigation, we analyzed individual interviews with six female undergraduate physics majors at a large, public, research university in the US to understand their progression at different transition points to becoming physicists.…
This paper is a faithful description of the author's career as a scientist, which often intersected that of Yves Couder. The emphasis of this paper is a true description of how the science that the author has been associated with really…
The reader surely knows what particles physics is about: finding building blocks of nature that appear elementary at a given time and study their interactions - so why in the world this essay? The problem is how to arrive at a fundamental…
Brief recollections by the author about how his work with Kip Thorne influenced his career in physics.
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…
Defining interdisciplinary physics today requires first a reformulation of what is physics today, which in turn calls for clarifying what makes a physicist. This assessment results from my forty year journey arguing and fighting to build…
Learning to think like a physicist (LTP) is often cited as a central goal of graduate physics education, yet what this means in practice and the extent to which physics graduate education prepares students to develop LTP and view LTP as…
After the development of a self-consistent quantum formalism nearly a century ago there began a quest for how to interpret the theoretical constructs of the formalism. In fact, the pursuit of new interpretations of quantum mechanics…