Related papers: Die Erste Stunde (The first hour)
Professor M. C. Polivanov and I met only a few times, during my infrequent visits to the-then Soviet Union in the 1970's and 1980's. His hospitality at the Moscow Steclov Institute made the trips a pleasure, while the scientific environment…
This lecture consists of two parts. The first is a (totally unsystematic) survey of some of the high points in the evolution of gravity and its successors, primarily in the course of the past century. The second summarizes some new work on…
This document is the Ph.D. thesis of Leonard Parker, submitted to Harvard University in 1966. Over the decades, several generations of physicists have been introduced to the concept of particle creation by gravitational fields, a phenomenon…
In these shorts notes I want to remembermy relationship with GianCarlo Ghirardi, who was my supervisor in my Master Degree in Physics at the University of Trieste and then he became a very deep and close friend. I don't want to describe in…
As a result of the deep modifications of the French physics and chemistry curricula in upper secondary school during these last three years, the physics department of the Universit\'e Paris Diderot (France) wished to develop a renovation…
These are the proceedings of the workshop on ``Effective Field Theories in Nuclear, Particle and Atomic Physics'' held at the Physikzentrum Bad Honnef of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, Bad Honnef, Germany from December 13 to 17,…
Einstein's theory of general relativity (GR) provides the best available description of gravity. The recent detection of gravitational waves and the first picture of a black hole have provided spectacular confirmations of GR, as well as…
In his Autobiographical Notes, Einstein mentioned that on his road to the final theory of general relativity it was a major difficulty to accustom himself to the idea that coordinates need not possess an immediate physical meaning in terms…
The Wigner's Friend thought experiment stands as one of the most intellectually provocative and challenging conceptual puzzles in quantum mechanics. It compels us to confront profound questions concerning the fundamental nature of reality,…
Metaphysics is the science of being and asks the question ``What really exists?'' The answer to this question has been sought for by mankind since the beginning of recorded time. In the past 2500 years there have been many answers to this…
Inspired by the one-hundredth anniversary of the seminal works of Stern and Gerlach, our contribution is a proposal of how to use their famous experiment in a more contemporary perspective. Our main idea is to re-cast the experiment in the…
A goal of physics is to understand the greatest possible breadth of natural phenomena in terms of the most economical set of basic concepts. However, as the understanding of physics has developed historically, its pedagogy and language have…
Wolfgang Kummer was well known for his passion for axial gauges and for the formulation of gravity in terms of Cartan variables. The combination of the two applied to two dimensional dilaton gravity is the basis of the "Vienna School",…
[Translation of and Commentary on L\'eon Rosenfeld's "Ueber die Gravitationwirkungen des Lichtes", Zeitschrift fur Physik 65: 589-599 (1930). Originally published in German. Submitted for publication on September 26, 1930. See [1] in the…
A New Mathematico-Physical and Information Theoretic Approach Examination of the available hard core information to firm up the process of unification of quantum and gravitational physics leads to the conclusion that for achieving this…
In this brief communication, we have studied the validity of the first law of thermodynamics for the universe bounded by event horizon with two examples. The key point is the appropriate choice of the temperature on the event horizon.…
In 1927, just after he obtained a full professorship, Enrico Fermi delivered his first course on Theoretical Physics at the Institute of Physics in Rome. The following year Edoardo Amaldi, Emilio Segre' and Ettore Majorana became students…
Euler stressed the importance of hypotheses, which he thought were the only means of arriving at a certain knowledge of the physical causes, essential to establish the laws of physics. This thought was communicated to Emilie du Chatelet in…
We describe an initiative at the University of Bonn, where the students develop and perform a 2 hour physics show for school classes and the general public. The show is entertaining and educational and is aimed at children aged 10 and…
I discuss Einstein's path-breaking November 1915 General Relativity papers. I show that Einstein's field equations of November 25, 1915 with an additional term on the right hand side involving the trace of the energy-momentum tensor appear…