Related papers: Remarkable Dates and Place: One Hundred Years Ago
We study the wave equation on a bounded domain of $\mathbb R^m$ and on a compact Riemannian manifold $M$ with boundary. We assume that the coefficients of the wave equation are unknown but that we are given the hyperbolic…
Dirac's contributions to the discovery of non-relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics, prior to his discovery of the relativistic wave equation, are described.
In this brief note I address the question not frequently asked, namely, why did it take two decades between Einstein's first proposal of photons and derivation of the full Planck formula from first principles of Statistical Mechanics,…
We outline Fermi's early attitude towards old quantum physics. We sketch out the context from which his interest for quantum physics arose, and we deal with his work on quantum statistics. We also go through the first two courses on…
The driving force in the pursuit for quantum computation is the exciting possibility that quantum algorithms can be more efficient than their classical analogues. Research on the subject has unraveled several aspects of how that can happen.…
Carrying out a research program outlined by John S. Bell in 1987, we arrive at a relativistic version of the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber (GRW) model of spontaneous wavefunction collapse. The GRW model was proposed as a solution of the measurement…
Julian Schwinger's influence on twentieth century science is profound and pervasive. Of course, he is most famous for his renormalization theory of quantum electrodynamics, for which he shared the Nobel Prize with Richard Feynman and…
The scattering of an electromagnetic plane wave by a spherical particle was solved analytically by Gustav Mie in 1908. The Mie solution is expressed as a series with very many terms thus obscuring the physical interpretations of the…
Ten years ago humankind achieved the first direct observation of gravitational waves. I give some personal recollections of that first detection. I also present an incomplete summary of what we have learned since then, and some speculations…
The Schr\"odinger's wave function can naturally be realized as an 'instantaneous resonant spatial mode' in which quantum particle moves and hence the Born's rule is derived after identifying its origin. This realization facilitates the…
We consider the problem of computing, for a detector surface waiting for a quantum particle to arrive, the probability distribution of the time and place at which the particle gets detected, from the initial wave function of the particle in…
We show that it is possible to measure Schrodinger wave of a single quantum system. This provides a strong argument for associating physical reality with the quantum state of a single system, and challenges the usual assumption that the…
We provide an insight into the origin of the phenomena reported 40 years ago by Kerker, Wang and Giles (Journal of the Optical Society of America, 73, 6, pp. 765-767, (1983)). We show that the impedance and refractive index matching…
Schr{\"o}dinger noticed in 1952 that a scalar complex wave function can be made real by a gauge transformation. The author showed recently that one real function is also enough to describe matter in the Dirac equation in an arbitrary…
The Schrodinger equation is incomplete, inherently unable to explain the collapse of the wavefunction caused by measurement; a fundamental issue known as the quantum measurement problem. Quantum mechanics is generally constrained by the…
According to Schroedinger's ideas, classical dynamics of point particles should correspond to the " geometrical optics " limit of a linear wave equation, in the same way as ray optics is the limit of wave optics. It is shown that, using…
In his monumental discoveries, the driving force for Einstein was, I believe, consistency of concept and principle rather than conflict with experiment. In this spirit, I would like to look at the journey from the classical to the…
We trace the evolution of quantization conditions from Planck's introduction of a new fundamental constant (h) in his treatment of blackbody radiation in 1900 to Heisenberg's interpretation of the commutation relations of modern quantum…
After the development of a self-consistent quantum formalism nearly a century ago, there ensued a quest to understand the often counterintuitive predictions of the theory. These endeavors invariably begin with the assumption of the "truth"…
The hydrogen atom is a system amenable to an exact treatment within Schroedinger's formulation of quantum mechanics according to coordinates in four systems -- spherical polar, paraboloidal, ellipsoidal and spheroconical coordinates; the…