Related papers: Remarkable Dates and Place: One Hundred Years Ago
In the mid-19th century, both the laws of mechanics and thermodynamics were known, and both appeared fundamental. This was changed by Boltzmann and Gibbs, who showed that thermodynamics can be *derived*, by applying mechanics to very large…
This colloquium summarizes Dirac's contributions to the discovery of quantum mechanics before he invented his relativistic wave equation.
This year is the centenary of the birth of Ettore Majorana, one of the major Italian physicists of all times. In this note we briefly sketch a few biographical details about Ettore Majorana and introduce and discuss the main points of…
In order to commemorate Alfred Land\'e's unriddling of the anomalous Zeeman Effect a century ago, we reconstruct his seminal contribution to atomic physics in light of the atomic models available at the time. Land\'e recognized that the…
The event GW150914 was the first historical detection of gravitational waves (GWs). The emergence of this ground-breaking discovery came not only from incredibly innovative experimental work, but also from a centennial of theoretical…
We propose that the Schrodinger equation results from applying the classical wave equation to describe the physical system in which subatomic particles play random motion, thereby leading to quantum mechanics. The physical reality described…
One of the greatest scientific achievements of physics in the 20th century is the discovery of quantum mechanics. The Schrodinger equation is the most fundamental equation in quantum mechanics describing the time-based evolution of the…
The esteemed physicist Erwin Schroedinger, whose name is associated with the most notorious equation of quantum mechanics, also wrote a brief essay entitled 'What is Life?', asking: 'How can the events in space and time which take place…
For the simple system of a point-like particle confined to a straight line, I compile, initially in a concise table, the structural elements of quantum mechanics and contrast them with those of classical (statistical) mechanics. Despite…
This volume covers one of the most thrilling two-year periods in twentieth-century physics, as matrix mechanics - developed chiefly by W. Heisenberg, M. Born, and P. Jordan - and wave mechanics - developed by E. Schr\"odinger - supplanted…
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…
Julian Schwinger (1918--1994), founder of renormalized quantum electrodynamics, was arguably the leading theoretical physicist of the second half of the 20th century. Thus it is not surprising that he made contributions to gravity theory as…
The notion of gravitational radiation begins with electromagnetic radiation. In 1887 Heinrich Hertz, working in one room, generated and received electromagnetic radiation. Maxwell's equations describe the electromagnetic field. The quanta…
An exact uncertainty principle, formulated as the assumption that a classical ensemble is subject to random momentum fluctuations of a strength which is determined by and scales inversely with uncertainty in position, leads from the…
One way of obtaining a version of quantum mechanics without observers, and thus of solving the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, is to modify the Schroedinger evolution by implementing spontaneous collapses of the wave function. An explicit…
Around year 2000 the centenary of Planck's thermal radiation formula awakened interest in the origins of quantum theory, traditionally traced back to the Planck's conference on 14 December 1900 at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. A lot of…
At the beginning of the twentieth century, two scientists, the Austrian Victor Hess and the Italian Domenico Pacini, developed two brilliant lines of research independently, leading to the determination of the origin of atmospheric…
In 1991 Roland De Witte carried out an experiment in Brussels in which variations in the one-way speed of RF waves through a coaxial cable were recorded over 178 days. The data from this experiment shows that De Witte had detected absolute…
From its seemingly non-intuitive and puzzling nature, most evident in numerous EPR-like gedankenexperiments to its almost ubiquitous presence in quantum technologies, entanglement is at the heart of modern quantum physics. First introduced…
A complete history of early atomic models would fill volumes, but a reasonably coherent tale of the path from mechanical atoms to the quantum can be told by focusing on the relevant work of three great contributors to atomic physics, in the…