Related papers: Lord Kelvin's Second Cloud
In 1900 Lord Kelvin identified two problems for 19th century physics, two "clouds" as he puts it: the relative motion of the ether with respect to massive objects, and Maxwell-Boltzmann's theorem on the equipartition of energy. These issues…
Towards the end of the 19th century, Kelvin pronounced as the "clouds of physics" 1) the failure of the Michelson-Morely experiment to detect an ether wind, 2) the violation of the classical mechanical equipartition theorem in statistical…
Physical science has changed in the century since Lord Kelvin's celebrated essay on Nineteenth Century Clouds over the Dynamical Theory of Heat and Light, but some things are the same. Analogs in what was happening in physics then and what…
Late in October 1911, eighteen leading scientists from all over Europe met to the first of a famous sequence of Solvay conferences in Brussels. This historical meeting was mainly devoted to "The Theory of Radiation and the Quanta", at a…
In two respects Ludwig Boltzmann was a pioneer of quantum mechanics. First because in his statistical interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics he introduced the theory of probability into a fundamental law of physics and thus…
It is very common to introduce quantum physics in an historical context. Though there are advantages to this, it is a problem that many of the stories that have become central to the physics lore are mere pseudo-histories far detached from…
Quantum mechanics---the theory describing the fundamental workings of nature---is famously counterintuitive: it predicts that a particle can be in two places at the same time, and that two remote particles can be inextricably and…
The radical changes in the concepts and approach in Physics at the turn of the Nineteenth century were so deep, that is acknowledged as a revolution. However, in 1970 Thomas Kuhn's careful reconstruction of the researches on the black body…
Why does such a successful theory like Quantum Mechanics have so many mysteries? The history of this theory is replete with dubious interpretations and controversies, and yet a knowledge of its predictions, however, contributed to the…
The twentieth century saw two fundamental revolutions in physics -- relativity and quantum. Daily use of these theories can numb the sense of wonder at their immense empirical success. Does their instrumental effectiveness stand on the rock…
Nearing a century since its inception, quantum mechanics is as lively as ever. Its signature manifestations, such as superposition, wave-particle duality, uncertainty principle, entanglement and nonlocality, were long confronted as weird…
At the 1927 Solvay conference, three different theories of quantum mechanics were presented; however, the physicists present failed to reach a consensus. Today, many fundamental questions about quantum physics remain unanswered. One of the…
Stephen Hawking's contributions to the understanding of gravity, black holes and cosmology were truly immense. They began with the singularity theorems in the 1960s followed by his discovery that black holes have an entropy and consequently…
The Seebeck effect consists in the induction of a voltage drop due to the temperature difference in a conductor. In the middle of XIXth century, Lord Kelvin has proposed a relation between the Seebeck coefficient and the derivative of the…
This comprehensive treatise is written for the special occasion of the author's 70th birthday. It presents his lifelong endeavors and reflections with original reasoning and re-interpretations of the most critical and misleading issues in…
From its very beginning, Quantum Theory developed contrary to the intentions of its creators. For Max Planck it marks the failure of a long-term research program, in which he tried to understand the 2nd law of thermodynamics…
Almost half a century before Einstein expounded his general theory of relativity, the English mathematician William Kingdon Clifford argued that space might not be Euclidean and proposed that matter is nothing but a small distortion in that…
The meeting patronized by Ernest Solvay in 1911, the first Solvay Council, marked the beginning of what can be called the first quantum revolution. Maurice de Broglie was one of the secretaries of the Council. He participated in the two…
British physicist Stephen Hawkings most important discovery was that black holes are not so black, as they possess a temperature and emit thermal radiation. In his popular science texts, Hawking offered a detailed explanation of this…
On 14 December 1900 Max Planck first formulated the idea of energy quanta related to a new universal constant now known as Planck's constant. Despite the following progress of thus initiated "quantum mechanics", the physical origin of both…