Related papers: Memories of a Theoretical Physicist
These notes are written for the book "From the past to the future: the legacy of Lev Lipatov", editors: Jochen Bartels et all, which will be published by WS. I tried to share with you the atmosphere and the flavour of everyday life in…
Feyerabend frequently discussed physics. He also referred to the history of the subject when motivating his philosophy of science. Alas, as some examples show, his understanding of physics remained superficial. In this respect, Feyerabend…
1. Introduction - 2. Astrophysics and Cosmology - 3. Neutrino Oscillations - 4. Higgs and New Physics Searches - 5. Flavour Physics and CP Violation - 6. QCD - 7. Heavy Ion Collisions - 8. Outlook
What should these lectures be? The subject assigned to us is so broad that many books can be written about it. So, in planning these lectures I had several options. One would be to focus on a narrow subset of topics and to cover them in…
We report on a profession-oriented course we offered at the University of Vienna, aimed at physics education teacher students. The course on Theoretical Classical Mechanics has been conceived and designed from its outset with the explicit…
The parts contributed by the author in recent discussions with several physicists and mathematicians are reviewed, as they have been occasioned by the 2006 book "The Trouble with Physics", of Lee Smolin. Some of the issues addressed are the…
There are many books on the classical subject of special relativity. However, after having spent a number of years, both in relativistic engineering and research with relativity, I have come to the conclusion that there exist a place for a…
In these lectures I start by briefly reviewing the status of the electroweak theory, in the Standard Model and beyond. I then discuss the motivation and the possible avenues for new physics, on the brink of the LHC start.
This paper will consist of a selected, personal view of some of the issues associated with the intersections of nuclear and particle physics. As well as touching on the recent developments we will attempt to look at how those aspects of the…
An account of determinism and indeterminism in physics, addressed to non-physicist readers, leading up to proposals for how to understand statements about the future and single-event probability, motivated by quantum mechanics.
Physics has a bad press: it is seen by a majority of people as a boring discipline ever since their High School days. There is no glamour to it, just toil and pain, and for many who engaged in it, the end sight is often unemployment. Could…
Quantum mechanics is one of our most successful physical theories; its predictions agree with experimental observations to an extremely high accuracy. However, the bare formalism of quantum theory does not provide straightforward answers to…
Personal view of author on goals and content of Mathematical Physics.
I recall my "first hour" events following on my meeting in Fall 1968 in the classroom with my academic teacher and thesis mentor Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. multiple Walter Greiner. My comments focus on the creation of the new "strong fields" domain…
These are the commentaries for a volume of reprints of my selected papers with commentaries that I am preparing for publication by World Scientific. Contents: Preface; (1)Early Years, and Condensed Matter Physics; (2) High Energy Neutrino…
This paper summarizes some challenges encountered and best practices established in several years of teaching Machine Learning for the Physical Sciences at the undergraduate and graduate level. I discuss motivations for teaching ML to…
This paper starts with a personal memoir of how some significant ideas arose and events took place during the period from 1972, when I first encountered Ted Bastin, to 1979, when I proposed the foundation of ANPA. I then discuss program…
The purpose of this brief article is to clarify certain distortions of the history of ideas about the quantum theory of de Sitter space that have appeared in recent literature.
"All men by nature desire to know," states Aristotle in the famous first sentence of his Metaphysics. Knowledge about fundamental particles and interactions, that is, knowledge about the deepest aspects of matter, is certainly high if not…
Some thoughts are presented on the inter-relation between beauty and truth in science in general and theoretical physics in particular. Some conjectural procedures that can be used to create new ideas, concepts and results are illustrated…