Related papers: John Archibald Wheeler: A Biographical Memoir
Sir Arthur Eddington is considered one of the greatest astrophysicist of the twentieth century and yet he gained a stigma when, in the 1930s, he embarked on a quest to develop a unified theory of gravity and quantum mechanics. His attempts…
Galilean Relativity and Einstein's Special and General Relativity showed that the Laws of Physics go deeper than their representations in any given reference frame. Thus covariance, or independence of Laws of Physics with respect to changes…
Philip Warren Anderson was a pioneering theoretical physicist whose work fundamentally shaped our understanding of complex systems. Anderson received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977 for his groundbreaking research on localization and…
Gedanken experiments are important conceptual tools in the quest to reconcile our classical intuition with quantum mechanics and nowadays are routinely performed in the laboratory. An important open question is the quantum behaviour of the…
Dealing with Eugene Wigner's ideas on the measurement procedure in quantum physics and unearthing the controversy that pitted him against supporters of the interpretation of complementarity, I will show how Wigner and his followers…
An account of Richard Feynman's work on gravitational waves is given. Feynman's involvement with this subject can be traced backto 1957, when he attended the famous Chapel Hill conference on the Role of Gravitation in Physics. At that…
This article is concerned with the role of fundamental principles in theoretical physics, especially quantum theory. The fundamental principles of relativity will be be addressed as well in view of their role in quantum electrodynamics and…
Steven Weinberg productive scientific life teaches us many things, one of the most important of which is the power of his example. This essay contains personal reminiscences and a speculation about gravitational wave propagation based on…
Recently, much attention has been focused on the replicability of scientific results, causing scientists, statisticians, and journal editors to examine closely their methodologies and publishing criteria. Experimental particle physicists…
James Clerk Maxwell is known for his outstanding contributions to fundamental physics. These include providing the equations that govern electric and magnetic fields, establishing the basis of modern colourimetry, finding important…
Non-relativistic quantum particles in the Earth's gravitational field are successfully described by the Schr\"{o}dinger equation with Newton's gravitational potential. Particularly, quantum mechanics is in agreement with such experiments as…
Hoyle and Narlikar (HN) in the 1960's developed a theory of gravitation which was completely Machian and used both retarded and advanced waves to communicate gravitational influence between particles. The advanced waves, which travel…
Throughout history, a relatively small number of individuals have made a profound and lasting impact on science and society. Despite long-standing, multi-disciplinary interests in understanding careers of elite scientists, there have been…
The Many-worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics has captivated physicists and philosophers alike since its inception in the mid-20th century. This paper explores the historical roots, evolution, and implications of the MWI within…
A phenomenon can hardly be found that accompanied physical paradigms and theoretical concepts in a more reflecting way than magnetism. From the beginnings of metaphysics and the first classical approaches to magnetic poles and streamlines…
I describe aspects of my life in physics: the name I publish under, great physicists I have known, how I got into quantum foundations, what role I've played in it. My form is autobiographical, but my personal experience may illustrate what…
The broad debate on foundational issues in quantum mechanics, which took place at the famous 1957 Chapel Hill conference on \textit{The Role of Gravitation in Physics}, is here critically analyzed with an emphasis on Richard Feynman's…
Wheeler has strikingly illustrated the wave-particle duality by the delayed-choice thought experiment, in which the configuration of a 2-path interferometer is chosen after a single-photon light-pulsed has entered it. We present a…
A.P. Balachandran was a theoretical physicist of extraordinary versatility and originality. In a career spanning over six decades, he made many significant contributions to quantum field theory and mathematical physics. His influence…
The derivation of absorber theory is outlined in very detail. Absorber theory is based on classical action-at-a-distance electrodynamics, but it deviates from that theory at a crucial point. It is shown that (a) absorber theory cannot…