Related papers: Memories of a Theoretical Physicist
This is a prelude to a book which I intend to publish. This paper describes my temporary thoughts on Einstein's pathway to the special theory of relativity. See my papers on my thoughts on Einstein's pathway to his general theory of…
"So what do you do? I mean, what do you actually do?" This is one of the most common questions one theoretical physicist receives from her students, and is representative of a common curiosity among aspiring physicists. Students often…
Dedicated to the centenary of the Ioffe Institute, the article contains the shortest review of scientific achievements of the theorists of the institute during this time. We concentrate mainly on research in the field of elementary particle…
Education is a goal-oriented field. But if we want to treat education scientifically so we can accumulate, evaluate, and refine what we learn, then we must develop a theoretical framework that is strongly rooted in objective observations…
Physicists engage with the public to varying degrees at different stages of their careers. However, their public engagement covers many activities, events, and audiences, making their motivations and professional development needs not well…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
Many physicists, following Einstein, believe that the ultimate aim of theoretical physics is to find a unified theory of all interactions which would not depend on any free dimensionless constant, i.e., a dimensionless constant that is only…
This is a preface to A Passion for Theoretical Physics, a special issue collection of articles published in J. Phys. A in memory of Peter G. O. Freund.
This memoire covers my life history starting with my family's background and their immigration to the US. It continues with my childhood, my early education, and my introduction to science. It then covers my professional research included a…
The origins of Sociophysics are discussed from a personal testimony. I trace back its history to the late seventies. My twenty years of activities and research to establish and promote the field are reviewed. In particular the conflicting…
The job of a physicist is to describe Nature. General features, hypotheses and theories help to describe physics phenomena at a more abstract, fundamental level, and are sometimes tacitly assigned some sort of real existence; doing so…
Recollections by the author about how his interactions with John Wheeler influenced his career in physics.
In the 60s of the last century the few courses of History of physics in Physics degree were held by scholars who, apart from a few exceptions, did not have a specific research background in the field. Some activities, books, social…
In 1963-71, a group of people, myself included, formulated and perfected a new approach to physics problems, which eventually came to be known under the names of scaling, universality, and renormalization. This work formed the basis of a…
Brief recollections of how the author interacted with Steve Weinberg over issues in quantum mevhanics
I wrote this book in a "do-it-yourself" style so that I give only a draft of tensor theory, which includes formulating definitions and theorems and giving basic ideas and formulas. All other work such as proving consistence of definitions,…
A personal perspective on the future challenges of research in particle physics is presented with emphasis on the role of DIS physics in this endeavour.
Twenty years ago, in October 1990, I found myself attending a workshop on Theoretical Physics in Chernomorka (Ukraine) intended only for Soviet physicists. That trip to the USSR/CCCP as well as the preceding months at CERN were highly…
In high energy physics, scholarly papers circulate primarily through online preprint archives based on a centralized repository, arXiv, that physicists simply refer to as "the archive". This is not just a tool for preservation and memory,…
A theory of everything should not only tell us the laws for matter, gravity, and possibly boundary condition for the universe. In addition, it should specify the relation between theory and experience. Here I argue for a minimal…