Related papers: Steven Weinberg: A Scientific Life
On January 4, 2012, the centenary of Henri Poincar\'e's death, a colloquium was held in Nancy, France the subject of which was "Vers une biographie d'Henri Poincar\'e". Scholars discussed several approaches for writing a biography of…
A recent essay [1] reminds us of how richly Boltzmann deserves to be admiringly commemorated for the originality of his ideas on the occasion of his 150th birthday. Without any doubt, the scientific community owes Boltzmann a great debt of…
I share some reminiscences of the late Steven Weinberg. Then I discuss a topic in quantum field theory which he taught me: the role of state wave functionals in deriving the $i\epsilon$ term of the Feynman propagator when using the…
This is my contribution to Stephen Hawking's 60th birthday party. Happy Birthday Stephen!
Science of science (SciSci) is an emerging discipline wherein science is used to study the structure and evolution of science itself using large data sets. The increasing availability of digital data on scholarly outcomes offers…
The mathematical achievements of Harry Kesten since the mid-1950s have revolutionized probability theory as a subject in its own right and in its associations with aspects of algebra, analysis, geometry, and statistical physics. Through his…
Einstein is usually revered as the father of special and general relativity. In this article I demonstrate that he is also the father of Solid State Physics, or even his broader version known as Condensed Matter Physics (including liquids).…
Book Review for: "A New Kind of Science", by Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Media, Inc. Champaign IL 2002).
Throughout John Wheeler's career, he wrestled with big issues like the fundamental length, the black hole and the unification of quantum mechanics and relativity. In this essay, I argue that solid state physics -- historically the study of…
A biographical profile of the theoretical physicist, Julian Schwinger, and a discussion of "The Memories of Julian" Centennial Celebration (held at Harvard University on February 12, 2018) is presented herein.
This is a review of Lee Smolin's "The Trouble with Physics". The main gist of the review is that the physics of the past three decades has been rich with new discoveries in a large number of domains. The Standard Model, while providing a…
Detlef D\"urr (1951-2021) was a theoretical and mathematical physicist who worked particularly on the foundations of quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, and statistical mechanics. This piece is a rather personal look back at him and his…
The year 2005 marks the hundredth anniversary of the pioneering contribution of Einstein's to modern physics in 1905. The discussion of Einstein's five groundbreaking fundamental papers, which change our picture of the universe and ideas…
Cosmoparticle physics offers the exciting challenge for the new Millenium to come to the true knowledge on the basic natural laws and on the way, they govern the creation and evolution of the Universe with all the forms of its present…
I argue that most of the key experiments that have born semiconductor spintronics were done and published earlier than the papers cited in the Nature Physics, 4 S20 (2008) milestone article (http://www.nature.com/milestones/spin, milestone…
This article, dedicated, with admiration to Reuben Hersh, for his forthcoming 90th birthday, argues that mathematics today is not yet a science, but that it is high time that it should become one.
Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. The last years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the…
The World Year of Physics (2005) is an international celebration to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Einstein's "Annus Mirabilis". The United Nations has officially declared 2005 the International Year of Physics. However, the…
This a biographical essay about Edsger Wybe Dijkstra.
The recent discovery that Einstein once attempted - and quickly abandoned - a steady-state model of the expanding universe sheds new light on his philosophical journey from static to dynamic cosmologies.