Related papers: John Archibald Wheeler: A Biographical Memoir
This article follows the scientific life of John Norris Bahcall, including his tenacious pursuit of the solar neutrino problem, his contributions to our understanding of galaxies, quasars, and their emissions, and his leadership of and…
In the late 1960s, a young physicist was sailing along the coast of California towards Berkeley, where he got a post-doc position in astronomy. But his real goal was not astronomy, at least not immediately. First, John Clauser eagerly…
Nuclear Physics has had its ups and downs. However in recent years, bucked up by some new and often puzzling data, it has become a potentially very rich field. We review some of these exciting developments in a few important sectors of…
This note is based upon a talk given at a celebration in Austin Texas of the achievements of J. Willard Gibbs. J. Willard Gibbs, the younger, was the first American physical sciences theorist. He was one of the inventors of statistical…
The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the earliest work of L\'eon Rosenfeld, one of the pioneers in the search of Quantum Gravity, the supposed theory unifying quantum theory and general relativity. We describe how and why Rosenfeld…
The biggest and most lasting among David Bohm's (1917-1992) many achievements is to have proposed a picture of reality that explains the empirical rules of quantum mechanics. This picture, known as pilot wave theory or Bohmian mechanics…
The research in quantum gravity has jauntily grown in the recent years, intersecting with conceptual and philosophical issues that have a long history. In this paper I analyze the conceptual basis on which Loop Quantum Gravity has grown,…
Disavowed by one its fathers, ill defined, never empirically tested, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation has nevertheless had a powerful influence on fundamental physics. A well deserved one.
Evidence is recalled of the strong opposition of Niels Bohr, at the time of the Old Quantum Theory 1.913-25, to the Lichtquanten hypothesis of Einstein. Some episodes with H.A. Kramers, J.C. Slater and W. Heisenberg are recollected; Bohr's…
The spectacular successes of quantum physics have made it a commonplace to assert that we live in a quantum world. This idea seems to imply a kind of "quantum fundamentalism" according to which everything in the universe (if not the…
The delayed choice experiments of the type introduced by Wheeler and extended by Englert, Scully, S\"ussmann and Walther [ESSW], and others, have formed a rich area for investigating the puzzling behaviour of particles undergoing quantum…
Even if Einstein brought major contributions as a founder of quantum mechanics, he remained deeply unsatisfied with the bases of this structure he knew to be so efficient for physics. His critics are often known through his numerous…
Alastair Graham Walker Cameron was an astrophysicist and planetary scientist of broad interests and exceptional originality. A founder of the field of nuclear astrophysics, he developed the theoretical understanding of the chemical…
I want to give an impression of the time I spent together with John S. Bell, of the atmosphere of our collaboration and friendship. I briefly review our work, the methods of nonrelativistic approximations to quantum field theory for…
While I was dealing with a brain injury and finding it difficult to work, two friends (Derek Westen, a friend of the KITP, and Steve Shenker, with whom I was recently collaborating), suggested that a new direction might be good. Steve in…
Albert Einstein's practice in physics and his philosophical positions gradually reoriented themselves from more empiricist towards rationalist viewpoints. This change accompanied his turn towards unified field theory and different…
Belenchia et al. [Phys. Rev. D 98, 126009 (2018)] have analyzed a gedankenexperiment where two observers, Alice and Bob, attempt to communicate via superluminal signals using a superposition of massive particles dressed by Newtonian fields…
Most physics textbooks at college and university level introduce quantum physics in a historical context. However, the textbook version of this history does not match the actual history. In this article, the first in a series of articles…
Niels Bohr's doctrine of the primacy of "classical concepts" is arguably his most criticized and misunderstood view. We present a new, careful historical analysis that makes clear that Bohr's doctrine was primarily an epistemological…
It is widely known that Paul Ehrenfest formulated and applied his adiabatic hypothesis in the early 1910s. Niels Bohr, in his first attempt to construct a quantum theory in 1916, used it for fundamental purposes in a paper which eventually…