Related papers: Die Erste Stunde (The first hour)
In the very early universe, a generalized Schwinger effect can create pairs from both electrical and gravitational fields. The expectation value of fermionic current induced by these newly created pairs has been recently computed in de…
Henry Stapp has made many significant contributions in quantum physics and its use in trying to understand the mind-matter relationship. I have been influenced by his use of the notion of {\em process} to bring more clarity to understand…
Allegedly, Brouwer discovered his famous fixed point theorem while stirring a cup of coffee and noticing that there is always at least one point in the liquid that does not move. In this paper, based on a talk in honour of Brouwer at the…
One of the major developments of twentieth century physics has been the gradual recognition that a common feature of the known fundamental interactions is their gauge structure. In this article the authors review the early history of gauge…
Einstein's happiest thought was his leap from the observation that a falling person feels no gravity to the realization that gravity might be equivalent to acceleration. It affects all bodies in the same way because it is a property of…
Julian Schwinger (1918--1994), founder of renormalized quantum electrodynamics, was arguably the leading theoretical physicist of the second half of the 20th century. Thus it is not surprising that he made contributions to gravity theory as…
I describe our understanding of physics near the Planck length, in particular the great progress in the last four years in string theory. These are lectures presented at the 1998 SLAC Summer Institute.
We begin herewith the editing of physics notes taken in the course of Journal Club seminars at INFN-LNF in 1996. The activity consists of informal talks about work in progress and/or review of (more or less) recent physics results of…
We present the first English translation of Einstein's original papers related to the teleparallel ('absolute parallelism', 'distant parallelism' and the German 'Fernparallelismus' are synonyms) attempt of an unified field theory of…
Einstein regarded as one of the triumphs of his 1915 theory of gravity --- the general theory of relativity --- that it vindicated the action--reaction principle, while Newtonian mechanics as well as his 1905 special theory of relativity…
The Physics First movement - teaching a true physics course to ninth grade students - is gaining popularity in high schools. There are several different rhetorical arguments for and against this movement, and it is quite controversial in…
These are some thoughts contained in a letter to colleagues, about the close relation between gravity and quantum mechanics, and also about the possibility of seeing quantum gravity in a lab equipped with quantum computers. I expect this…
This work assembles some basic theoretical elements on thermal equilibrium, stability conditions, and fluctuation theory in self-gravitating systems illustrated with a few examples. Thermodynamics deals with states that have settled down…
This paper presents some ideas which might assist teachers incorporating special relativity into an introductory physics curriculum. One can define the proper-time/velocity pair, as well as the coordinate-time/velocity pair, of a traveler…
Treating time as a local variable permits robust approaches to kinematics that forego questions of extended-simultaneity, which because of their abstract nature might not be addressed explicitly until a first relativity course and even then…
This document summarises discussions on future directions in theoretical neutrino physics, which are the outcome of a neutrino theory workshop held at CERN in February 2025. The starting point is the realisation that neutrino physics offers…
The connection between spin and symmetry was established by Wigner in his 1939 paper on the Poincar\'e group. For a massive particle at rest, the little group is O(3) from which the concept of spin emerges. The little group for a massless…
The investigations of the author on a new independent theory of field, termed a vacuum field theory (VFT), have been presented in four publications. It has been based on the axioms for inactivated and activated state of vacuum. An inertial…
We theoretically study the magnetic properties of iron germanium, known as one of canonical helimagnets. For this purpose we use the real-space spin Hamiltonian and micromagnetic model, derived in terms of Andersen's "local force theorem",…
This is a lightly edited version of the talk given on September 30, 2020 to inaugurate the international seminar series {\it All Things EFT}. It reviews some of the early history of effective field theories, and concludes with a discussion…