Related papers: How a fake Kepler portrait became iconic
In 1965 the Nobel Foundation honored Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, and Richard Feynman for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics and the consequences for the physics of elementary particles. In contrast to both of his…
Ranked near the top of the long list of exciting discoveries made with NASA's Kepler photometer is the detection of transiting circumbinary planets. In just over a year the number of such planets went from zero to seven, including a…
We present a natural proof of Kepler's law of ellipses in the spirit of Euclidean geometry. Moreover we discuss two existing Euclidean geometric proofs, one by Feynman in hist Lost Lecture from 1964 and the other by Newton in the Principia…
Can we define what it means to be "creative," and if so, can our definition drive artificial intelligence (AI) systems to feats of creativity indistinguishable from human efforts? This mixed question is considered from technological and…
The claim that a particle is an irreducible representation of the Poincar\'e group -- what I call \emph{Wigner's identification} -- is now, decades on from Wigner's (1939) original paper, so much a part of particle physics folklore that it…
Historically, Ehrenfest's theorem (1927) is the first one which shows that classical physics can emerge from quantum physics as a kind of approximation. We recall the theorem in its original form. Next, we highlight its generalizations to…
This paper is the second part of my overview on photon colliders given at the conference ``The photon: its first hundred years and the future'' (PHOTON2005 + PLC2005). The first paper describes the first 25 years of the history and…
From the geocentric, closed world model of Antiquity to the wraparound universe models of relativistic cosmology, the parallel history of space representations in science and art illustrates the fundamental role of geometric imagination in…
In the period from about 1890 to 1915 an interdisciplinary and unifying research programme known as "cosmical physics" attracted much scientific and public attention. It typically included aspects of the earth sciences (such as magnetic…
The great development of astrometric accuracy since the observations by Hipparchus about 150 BC was documented in 2008 in the first version of the present report. This report was updated in H{\o}g (2017d), e.g. with recent information on…
Can a machine or algorithm discover or learn Kepler's first law from astronomical sightings alone? We emulate Johannes Kepler's discovery of the equation of the orbit of Mars with the Rudolphine tables using AI Feynman, a physics-inspired…
Albert Einstein accepted a 'special' visiting professorship at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands in February 1920. Although his appointment should have been a mere formality, it took until October of that year before Einstein…
We present the first data release of the Kepler Smear Campaign, using collateral 'smear' data obtained in the Kepler four-year mission to reconstruct light curves of 102 stars too bright to have been otherwise targeted. We describe the…
Scientific cosmology has now reached its period of maturity with the establishment of a standard model, which is the theory of an expanding universe. The question of whether this expansion resolves itself, in the past, into a singularity…
The problem of the reflectance of a photon by a metallic mirror whose position is treated quantum mechanically is considered. The interaction between the metallic surface and the light is treated classically. It is shown that the…
Our understanding of the history of the solar system has undergone a revolution in recent years, owing to new theoretical insights into the origin of Pluto and the discovery of the Kuiper belt and its rich dynamical structure. The emerging…
In 1902, P. St\"{a}ckel proved the existence of a transcendental function $f(z)$, analytic in a neighbourhood of the origin, and with the property that both $f(z)$ and its inverse function assume, in this neighbourhood, algebraic values at…
This paper is a discussion of the physics of magnification in telescopes. Special attention is given to the question of whether telescopes magnify stars. Telescopes do magnify star images, although opinions to the contrary abound.
Perhaps more than other physical sciences, astronomy is frequently statistical in nature. The objects under study are inaccessible to direct manipulation in the laboratory, so the astronomer is restricted to observing a few external…
Hodographs for the Kepler problem are circles. This fact, known since almost two centuries ago, still provides the simplest path to derive the Kepler first law. Through Feynman `lost lecture', this derivation has now reached to a wider…