Related papers: Lord Kelvin's Second Cloud
This article is a summary of a talk about Richard Feynman, given at a conference Polymaths across the Eras organized in November 2023 by the St Cross Centre for the History and Philosophy of Physics (HAPP) in Oxford. It describes Feynman as…
An extraordinary event took place recently in Ireland. A group of independent and professional researchers met to discuss an old heterodox topic with important consequences in astrophysics and, especially, in cosmology: possible causes of…
In 1974 Steven Hawking showed that black holes emit thermal radiation, which eventually causes them to evaporate. The problem of the fate of information in this process is known as the "black hole information paradox". Two main types of…
In a fundamental formulation of the quantum mechanics of a closed system such as the universe as a whole, three forms of information are needed to make predictions for the probabilities of alternative time histories of the closed system .…
An overview is given in section 1, of uncertain building blocks of present-day cosmologies. Thereafter, these edited lecture notes deal with the following four special problems: (1) They advertise Wiltshire's result -- making `dark energy'…
A new contextualised reading of Fritz Zwicky's 1933 article ''The redshift of extragalactic nebulae'' about the virial analysis of the velocity dispersion of galaxies in the Coma cluster leads to a reconsideration of the traditional…
A common understanding of quantum mechanics (QM) among students and practical users is often plagued by a number of "myths", that is, widely accepted claims on which there is not really a general consensus among experts in foundations of…
In 1834-1835, Hamilton published two papers that revolutionized classical mechanics. In these papers, he introduced the Hamilton-Jacobi equation, Hamilton's equations of motion and the principle of least action. These three formulations of…
I argue that Einstein overlooked an important aspect of the relativity of time in never quite realizing his quest to embody Mach's principle in his theory of gravity. As a step towards that goal, I broaden the Strong Equivalence Principle…
Wave-particle duality is often considered as the modern answer to the problem of the nature of light after more than 2000 years of questioning. It is also the answer given by quantum physics concerning the nature of matter particles and any…
Rapid ongoing progress in quantum information science makes this an apt time for a Solvay Conference focused on The Physics of Quantum Information. Here I review four intertwined themes encompassed by this topic: Quantum computer science,…
The observation of twenty cosmic-ray air-showers at and above 10^{20} eV poses fascinating problems for particle astrophysics: how the primary particles are accelerated to these energies, how the primaries get here through the 2.7K…
The wave-particle duality of light introduces two fundamental problems to imaging, namely, the diffraction limit and the photon shot noise. Quantum information theory can tackle them both in one holistic formalism: model the light as a…
It is shown how the study of blackbody radiation in the early twentieth century by the German physicist Max Planck gave rise to the quantum theory.
Albert Einstein postulated the equivalence of energy and mass, developed the theory of special relativity, explained the photoelectric effect, and described Brownian motion in five papers, all published in 1905, 100 years ago. With these…
The steady, supersonic outflow from the Sun we call the solar wind was first posited in the 1950s and initial theories rightly linked the acceleration of the wind to the existence of the million-degree solar corona. Still today, the wind…
The Kalam cosmological argument, of a metaphysical nature, asserts that the universe had a first cause. This study examines the compatibility of its premises through a bibliographic review of advancements in contemporary physics. Quantum…
This essay is based on a talk at Advances in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Sciences 2020 (AAMOS20) in a symposium honoring Prof. S. T. Manson's decades-long contribution to photoabsorption studies. Quantum physics introduced into physics…
A scheme for treating the Second Law of thermodynamics as a constraint and accounting for the approximate nature of constitutive assumptions in continuum thermomechanics is discussed. An unconstrained, concave, variational principle is…
We summarize our investigations of the second-order perturbations in loop quantum cosmology (LQC). We shall discuss, primarily, two aspects. Firstly, whether the second-order contributions arising from the cosmic bounce, occurring at Planck…