Related papers: Insights from the History for Teaching Antimatter
This short essay aims to offer a discursive presentation of three scientific articles by Ettore Majorana highlighting the fundamental importance of one of them - the last one - for the investigation of the intimate constitution of matter.…
Although dark matter is a central element of modern cosmology, the history of how it became accepted as part of the dominant paradigm is often ignored or condensed into a brief anecdotical account focused around the work of a few pioneering…
We retrace the first steps towards understanding neutrinos, particles predicted by Pauli in 1930 to avoid a supposed violation of time-translation symmetry. Despite the tendency to reduce the whole story to his intuition and the skill of…
There are several mathematical and physical reasons why Dirac's quantization must hold. How far one can go without it remains an open problem. The present work outlines a few steps in this direction.
Mathematical conception of infinite quantities forms a cornerstone of many disciplines of modern mathematics --- from differential calculus to set theory. In fact, it could be argued that the most significant revolutions in mathematics in…
We set out a fundamental ontology of atomism in terms of matter points. While being most parsimonious, this ontology is able to match both classical and quantum mechanics, and it remains a viable option for any future theory of cosmology…
In this paper we suggest to anticipate the introduction of concepts such as quantum state and the operators connected to their transformations well in advance of what is usually done.
A common learning goal for modern physics instructors is for students to recognize a difference between the experimental uncertainty of classical physics and the fundamental uncertainty of quantum mechanics. Our studies suggest this…
In a first historical part I shall give a detailed description of how Pauli discovered --before the advent of the new quantum mechanics -- his exclusion principle. The second part is devoted to the insight and results that have been…
Classical objects have been excluded as subjects of the observed quantum properties, and the related problem of quantum objects nature has been suspended since the early days of Quantum Theory. Recent experiments show that the problem could…
We offer a survey of the matter-antimatter evolution within the primordial Universe. While the origin of the tiny matter-antimatter asymmetry has remained one of the big questions in modern cosmology, antimatter itself has played a large…
Classical theory asserts that several electromagnetic waves cannot interact with matter if they interfere destructively to zero, whereas quantum mechanics predicts a nontrivial light-matter dynamics even when the average electric field…
Fermi helped establish a new framework for understanding matter, based on quantum theory. This framework refines and improves traditional atomism in two crucial respects. First, the elementary constituents of matter belong to a very small…
Quantum electrodynamics is the well-accepted theory. However, we feel it is useful to look at formalisms that provide alternative ways to describe light, because in the recent years the development of quantum field theories based primarily…
This colloquium summarizes Dirac's contributions to the discovery of quantum mechanics before he invented his relativistic wave equation.
One of Feynman's greatest contributions to physics was the interpretation of negative energies as antimatter in quantum field theory. A key component of this interpretation is the Feynman propagator, which seeks to describe the behavior of…
One of the main activities in science teaching, and in particular in Physics teaching, is not only the discussion of both modern problems and problems which solution is an urgent matter. It means that the picture of an active and alive…
Due to the standard electroweak model we have become accustomed to think about a neutrino $\nu$ and its antineutrino $\bar \nu$ as distinct particles. However, it has long been recognized that the apparent distinction between them may be…
Authoritative appraisals qualified this book as an axiomatic theory. However, being its essential content no more than an analogy, its theoretical organization cannot be an axiomatic one. In fact, in the first edition Dirac declares to…
A systematic analysis is made of the relations between the symmetries of a classical field and the symmetries of the one-particle quantum system that results from quantizing that field in regimes where interactions are weak. The results are…