Related papers: Richard Feynman's talent for finding things out
Simulating quantum many-body systems on a classical computer generally requires a computational cost that grows exponential with the number of particles. This computational complexity has been the main obstacle to understanding various…
Distance education has expanded significantly over the last decade, but the natural sciences have lagged in the implementation of this instructional mode. The abrupt onset of the COVID-19 pandemic left educational institutions scrambling to…
We provide a detailed exposition of the connections between Boltzmann machines commonly utilized in machine learning problems and the ideas already well known in quantum statistical mechanics through Feynman's description of the same. We…
We scan Paul K. Feyerabend's work in philosophy of physics and of science more generally for insights that could be useful for the contemporary debate on the foundations of quantum mechanics. We take as our starting point what Feyerabend…
We generalize classical statistical mechanics to describe the kinematics and the dynamics of systems whose variables are constrained by a single quantum postulate (discreteness of the spectrum of values of at least one variable of the…
One might think that, once we know something is computable, how efficiently it can be computed is a practical question with little further philosophical importance. In this essay, I offer a detailed case that one would be wrong. In…
I argue that scientific determinism is not supported by facts, but results from the elegance of the mathematical language physicists use, in particular from the so-called real numbers and their infinite series of digits. Classical physics…
Random sampling in high dimensions has successfully been applied to phenomena as diverse as nuclear resonances, neural networks and black hole evaporation. Here we revisit an elegant argument by the British physicist Dennis Sciama, which…
Feynman's diagrammatic series is a common language for a formally exact theoretical description of systems of infinitely-many interacting quantum particles, as well as a foundation for precision computational techniques. Here we introduce a…
In this paper we show that with the help of accessible, teaching quality equipment, some interesting details of the motion of a gyroscope, typically overlooked in introductory courses, can be measured and compared to theory. We begin by…
A theory of 'time' as a form of 'information' is proposed. New tools such as Feynman Clocks, Collective Excitation Networks, Sequential Excitation Networks, Plateaus of Complexity, and Causal Networks are used to unify previously separate…
In this essay, I argue that mathematics is a natural science---just like physics, chemistry, or biology---and that this can explain the alleged "unreasonable" effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences. The main challenge for…
We recount the successful long career of classical physics, from Newton to Einstein, which was based on the philosophy of scientific realism. Special emphasis is given to the changing status and number of ontological entitities and…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
(transcript of a talk given by Prof.~Feshbach:) Nuclear physics has been and will be a major factor in science and technology. It makes unique and important contributions to medicine, to industry and to other sciences. Interaction with…
Set theory reduces all processes to assembly and disassembly. A similar architecture is proposed for nature as quantum computer. It resolves the classical space-time underlying Feynman diagrams into a quantum network of creation and…
This article explores the overall geometric manner in which human beings make sense of the world around them by means of their physical theories; in particular, in what are nowadays called pregeometric pictures of Nature. In these, the…
Julian Schwinger's influence on Twentieth Century science is profound and pervasive. Of course, he is most famous for his renormalization theory of quantum electrodynamics, for which he shared the Nobel Prize with Richard Feynman and…
Quantum corrections significantly influence the quantities observed in modern particle physics. The corresponding theoretical computations are usually quite lengthy which makes their automation mandatory. This review reports on the current…
"All men by nature desire to know," states Aristotle in the famous first sentence of his Metaphysics. Knowledge about fundamental particles and interactions, that is, knowledge about the deepest aspects of matter, is certainly high if not…