Related papers: The Ultraviolet myth
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…
Credible reasons are presented to reveal that many of the lingering century old enigmas, surrounding the behavior of at least an individual quantum particle, can be comprehended in terms of an objectively real specific wave function. This…
Catastrophes are at the heart of many fascinating optical phenomena. The rainbow, for example, is a ray catastrophe where light rays become infinitely intense. The wave nature of light resolves the infinities of ray catastrophes while…
Physical research looks for clues to quantum properties of the gravitational field. On the basis of the common Schr\"odinger theory, a simple model of the quantization of a Friedmann universe comprising dust and radiation is investigated.…
Here we present some results that would possibly have attracted the attention of the physics community in the early days of quantum mechanics in such a way that its development could have been different from what we see today. We will first…
In 1924, Satyendra Nath Bose's pioneering work laid the foundation for Bose-Einstein statistics, which describes particles with integral spins. His derivation of Planck's law for blackbody radiation bypassed classical assumptions, relying…
The Einstein-Rupp experiments were proposed in 1926 by Albert Einstein to study the wave versus particle nature of light. Einstein presented a theoretical analysis of these experiments to the Berlin Academy together with results of Emil…
In this contribution I discuss a peak in Einstein's endeavor to extract as much information as possible about the nature of radiation from the Planck distribution is his paper "On the Quantum Theory of Radiation" of 1916. This is one of the…
The problem of time is a notable obstacle towards the recognition of quantum theory as the ultimate fundamental description of nature. Quantum theory may not be complete if founded upon classical notions. Louis de Broglie, seeming to be…
We give an example in which it is possible to understand quantum statistics using classical concepts. This is done by studying the interaction of charged matter oscillators with the thermal and zeropoint electromagnetic fields…
Planck's introduction of the quantum of action in 1900 was followed by 25 years of trial and error in quest of the understanding of the quantum world; different ideas and directions had to be pursued until the path leading to the elementary…
The blackbody theory of Planck played a seminal role in the development of quantum theory at the turn of the past century. A blackbody cavity is generally thought to be a collection of photons in thermal equilibrium; the radiation emitted…
The interplay between optical and statistical physics is a rich and exciting field of study. Black body radiation was the first application of photon statistics, although it was initially treated as a problem of the cavity oscillators in…
Regardless of the unspecific notions of photons as light complexes, radiation bundles or wave packets, the radiation from a single state transition is at most a single continuous wave train that starts and ends with the transition. The…
At the 1927 Solvay conference, three different theories of quantum mechanics were presented; however, the physicists present failed to reach a consensus. Today, many fundamental questions about quantum physics remain unanswered. One of the…
Since its inception, quantum theory has been the subject of fierce interpretive controversy, which persists to this day. Disputed topics include the basic ontology and dynamics of the theory, the role (if any) of measurement, the meaning of…
Quantum physics, which describes the strange behavior of light and matter at the smallest scales, is one of the most successful descriptions of reality, yet it is notoriously inaccessible. Here we provide an approachable explanation of…
The extreme smallness of both the Planck length, on the one side, and the ratio of the gravitational to the electrical forces between, say, two electrons, on the other side has led to a widespread belief that the realm of quantum gravity is…
Along the lines of nonextensive statistical mechanics, based on the entropy $S_q = k(1- \sum_i p_i^q)/(q-1) (S_1=-k \sum_i p_i \ln p_i)$, and Beck-Cohen superstatistics, we heuristically generalize Planck's statistical law for the…
In this paper, using the viewpoint that quantum mechanics can be constructed as a classical field theory without any quantization I build a fully classical theory of thermal radiation. Planck's law for the spectral energy density of thermal…