Related papers: Insights from the History for Teaching Antimatter
Antimatter is one of the most fascinating aspects of Particle Physics and one of the most unknown ones too. In this article we concisely explain what is antimatter and its distinction between primordial and secondary, how it is produced,…
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…
A goal of physics is to understand the greatest possible breadth of natural phenomena in terms of the most economical set of basic concepts. However, as the understanding of physics has developed historically, its pedagogy and language have…
The Dirac negative energy sea introduced the concept of antimatter, and explained it, not least in its relationship to negative-energy solutions to the wave equation. Post-war, it was largely displaced by what I shall call the 'standard…
By a series of simple examples, we illustrate how the lack of mathematical concern can readily lead to surprising mathematical contradictions in wave mechanics. The basic mathematical notions allowing for a precise formulation of the theory…
This paper frames calculus as a global, centuries-long development rather than a subject that began only with Newton and Leibniz. Drawing on ideas from Greek, Indian, Islamic, and later European mathematics, it highlights how concepts like…
After some historical remarks concerning Schroedinger's discovery of wave mechanics, we present a unified formalism for the mathematical description of classical and quantum-mechanical systems, utilizing elements of the theory of operator…
The dual nature of matter and radiation and the concept of the structure of an atom share a number of key conceptual elements from quantum mechanics. Despite the similarities, we find that the concept of the structure of an atom is well…
This paper descrives the first experimental evidence of antimatter-wave interference, a process at the heart of Quantum Physics and its interpretation. For the case of ordinary matter particles, interference phenomena have been observed in…
We identify a number of problematic aspects of current classical and quantum theories of antimatter; we introduce a new mathematical formalism which is an antiautomorphic image of that of matter equivalent to charge conjugation at the…
After the development of a self-consistent quantum formalism nearly a century ago there began a quest for how to interpret the theoretical constructs of the formalism. In fact, the pursuit of new interpretations of quantum mechanics…
We review how antiparticles may be introduced in classical relativistic mechanics, and emphasize that many of their paradoxical properties can be more transparently understood in the classical than in the quantum domain.
An inspection of the contemporary physics literature reveals that, while matter is treated at all levels of study, from Newtonian mechanics to quantum field theory, antimatter is solely treated at the level of second quantization. For the…
We review the introduction in physics of the concepts of an elementary space length and of a fundamental time scale, analyzing some related unknown contributions by Ettore Majorana. In particular, we discuss the quasi-Coulombian scattering…
I shall use a few personal reminiscences of my time as a student and colleague of Dirac in Cambridge to introduce some reflections on the nature of research in theoretical physics. I shall discuss and illustrate the approach of Dirac to his…
Antiparticles may be interpreted as ordinary particles travelling backwards in time and the two descriptions are considered equivalent, at least in special relativity and relativistic quantum mechanics. It is suggested that, vice versa, the…
In this article we concisely explain: what antimatter is, its differentiation between primordial and secondary, how it is produced, where it can be found, the experiments carried out at CERN to create and analyze antiatoms, the problem of…
The understanding of the physical processes that lead to the origin of matter in the early Universe, creating both an excess of matter over anti-matter that survived until the present and a dark matter component, is one of the most…
A sketch of some of the fundamental notions related to the nature of knowledge is offered, with special focus on the role of mathematics and my own opinions. No single idea exposed here is entirely original; indeed, this topic has been…
We advance here our neoclassical theory of elementary charges by integrating into it the concept of spin of 1/2. The developed spinorial version of our theory has many important features identical to those of the Dirac theory such as the…