Related papers: The Ultraviolet myth
An alternative to the current accepted model of expanding universe is presented. The proposal is anchored in the objective realist, stochastic formulation of quantum mechanics wherein the Planck constant plays the role of a diffusion…
The procedure used to "do physics" in the macroscopic world is familiar: You take an object, start it off with a particular position and velocity, subject it to known forces (say gravity or friction, or both), and follow its trajectory. You…
Modern attempts to understand light go back to Newton who considered light to be particles, the so called corpuscular theory, and the other school of Huygens, Young and others. Huygens and Young viewpoint emphasised the wave property. This…
Quantum mechanics---the theory describing the fundamental workings of nature---is famously counterintuitive: it predicts that a particle can be in two places at the same time, and that two remote particles can be inextricably and…
Quantum theory was discovered in an adventurous way, under the urge to solve puzzles-like the spectrum of the blackbody radiation-that haunted the physics community at the beginning of the 20th century. It soon became clear, though, that…
The idea about a quantum nature of Planck's blackbody radiation law is deeply rooted in minds of most physicists. Einstein's work, in which the coefficients of spontaneous and induced emission were introduced, has always been regarded as a…
The tension, if not outright inconsistency, between quantum physics and general relativity is one of the great problems facing physics at the turn of the millennium. Most often, the problems arising in merging Einstein gravity and quantum…
It is shown how the study of blackbody radiation in the early twentieth century by the German physicist Max Planck gave rise to the quantum theory.
The Planck constant ($\hbar$) plays a pivotal role in quantum physics. Historically, it has been proposed as postulate, part of a genius empirical relationship $E=\hbar \omega$ in order to explain the intensity spectrum of the blackbody…
Quantum mechanics, one of the most successful theories in the history of science, was created to account for physical systems not describable by classical physics. Though it is consistent with all experiments conducted thus far, many of its…
This book examines a number of problems of quantum mechanics, most of which are not usually discussed. What is the origin of probabilities in the mechanics of the microworld? What is the nature of Planck's constant h? What is the nature of…
The starting point of quantum mechanics is the relationship between energy and momentum: energy is proportional to the squared momentum! As a result, energy and momentum have not been treated equally. The wave equation required by…
An interpretation and re-formulation of modern physics which removes the presumption of the space-time continuum, and bases physical theory on a small number of rational and empirical principles. After briefly describing the philosophical…
Heisenberg in 1929 introduced the "collapse of the wavepacket" into quantum theory. We review here an experiment at Berkeley which demonstrated several aspects of this idea. In this experiment, a pair of daughter photons was produced in an…
We derive the Planck law from a classical variational principle over probability densities, without invoking quantum states, quantized oscillator energies, or ensemble averages. We construct a generalized free energy functional involving…
Why does such a successful theory like Quantum Mechanics have so many mysteries? The history of this theory is replete with dubious interpretations and controversies, and yet a knowledge of its predictions, however, contributed to the…
In 1927 the great physicist Paul A. M. Dirac failed to provide a consistent quantum description of the phase of a radiation field. Only one year later, he developed the famous Dirac theory of the electron, which led to the anti-particle --…
As we approach the centenary of the discovery of quantum statistics in 1924, it is important to revisit Bose's original derivation of Planck's law usually ignored in most standard presentations of Bose-Einstein statistics. It introduced not…
In a fundamental formulation of the quantum mechanics of a closed system such as the universe as a whole, three forms of information are needed to make predictions for the probabilities of alternative time histories of the closed system .…
The Einstein-First project approaches the teaching of Einsteinian physics through the use of physical models and analogies. This paper presents an approach to the teaching of quantum physics which begins by emphasising the particle-nature…