Related papers: Physicists Are Still Joking
Steven Weinberg was a giant of late 20th Century physics on whose shoulders we stand while groping for the science of the 21st Century. This article provides a too-brief summary of a selection of his many achievements -- eight decades of…
A critical discussion of recent attempts to revise the modern physics history is presented.
This paper proposes that cognitive humor can be modeled using the mathematical framework of quantum theory. We begin with brief overviews of both research on humor, and the generalized quantum framework. We show how the bisociation of…
This year, 2010, is the 40th anniversary of Physical Review C as a separate section of the Physical Review. We write here with a double purpose: first, to describe how PRC has evolved and to explore how this evolution has reflected changes…
The image of physics is connected with simple "mechanical" deterministic events: that an apple always falls down, that force equals mass times acceleleration. Indeed, applications of such concept to social or historical problems go back two…
The two of us have shared a fascination with James Victor Uspensky's 1937 textbook $Introduction \, to \, Mathematical \, Probability$ ever since our graduate student days: it contains many interesting results not found in other books on…
This article -- written in honour of Juergen Ehlers -- consists of two different, though interlocking parts: Section 1 describes my 54 years of perpetual experiences and exchanges with him, both science and episodes, whilst section 2…
A study released by the Google Scholar team found an apparently increasing fraction of citations to old articles from studies published in the last 24 years (1990-2013). To demonstrate this finding we conducted a complementary study using a…
This short essay traces the conceptual history of micro- and macroscopicity in the context of physical science. By focusing on three distinct episodes spanning five centuries, we show the scientific and philosophical meanings of this…
We venture that the long evolution of science may be viewed as unfolding over three blurred epochs. The first epoch spans the slow, haphazard, error-ridden realization of scientific truths along with foundational scientific methods. The…
Suspicions that the world might be some sort of a machine or algorithm existing ``in the mind'' of some symbolic number cruncher have lingered from antiquity. Although popular at times, the most radical forms of this idea never reached…
Special relativity is no longer a new revolutionary theory but a firmly established cornerstone of modern physics. The teaching of special relativity, however, still follows its presentation as it unfolded historically, trying to convince…
At the frontier of most areas in science, computer simulations play a central role. The traditional division of natural science into experimental and theoretical investigations is now completely outdated. Instead, theory, simulation, and…
When we want to predict the future, we compute it from what we know about the present. Specifically, we take a mathematical representation of observed reality, plug it into some dynamical equations, and then map the time-evolved result back…
The art of the scientific presentation -- much like the art of the perfect plot, the art of the compelling proposal, and the art of the killer job application -- is generally not something we're taught in school. Therefore, in classic…
In 1963-71, a group of people, myself included, formulated and perfected a new approach to physics problems, which eventually came to be known under the names of scaling, universality, and renormalization. This work formed the basis of a…
Even as we advance the frontiers of physics knowledge, our understanding of how this knowledge evolves remains at the descriptive levels of Popper and Kuhn. Using the APS publications data sets, we ask in this letter how new knowledge is…
Cosmology as an exact physical science is of new date, but it has long roots in the past. This essay is concerned with four important themes in the history of cosmological thought which, if taken together, offer a fairly comprehensive…
Slacker Astronomy is a weekly podcast that covers a recent astronomical news event or discovery. The show has a unique style consisting of irreverent, over-the-top humor combined with a healthy dose of hard science. According to our…
We apply the Google PageRank algorithm to assess the relative importance of all publications in the Physical Review family of journals from 1893--2003. While the Google number and the number of citations for each publication are positively…