Related papers: Lord Kelvin's Second Cloud
This article is a slightly expanded version of the talk I delivered at the Special Plenary Session of the 46-th Annual Meeting of the Israel Physical Society (Technion, Haifa, May 11, 2000) dedicated to Misha Marinov. In the first part I…
The conference \emph{Black Holes Inside and Out} marked the 50th anniversary of Hawking's seminal paper on black hole radiance. It was clear already from Hawking's analysis that a proper quantum gravity theory would be essential for a more…
We reconsider the crucial 1927 Solvay conference in the context of current research in the foundations of quantum theory. Contrary to folklore, the interpretation question was not settled at this conference and no consensus was reached;…
The Dulong-Petit limiting law for the specific heats of solids, one of the first general results in thermodynamics, has provided Mendeleev with a powerful tool for devising the periodic table and gave an important support to Boltzmann's…
Incomputability as a mathematical notion arose from work of Alan Turing and Alonzo Church in the 1930s. Like Turing himself, it attracted less attention than it deserved beyond the confines of mathematics. Today our experiences in computer…
Several years ago, I suggested a quantum field theory which has many attractive features. (1) It can explain the quantization of electric charge. (2) It describes symmetrized Maxwell equations. (3) It is manifestly covariant. (4) It…
An attempt is made to de-mystify the apparent "paradox" between microscopic time revsersibility and macroscopic time irreversibility. It is our common experience that a hot cup of coffee cools down to room temperature and it never…
Most physics textbooks at college and university level introduce quantum physics in a historical context. However, the textbook version of this history does not match the actual history. In this article, the first in a series of articles…
The Standard Model is in good shape, apart possibly from g_\mu - 2 and some niggling doubts about the electroweak data. Something like a Higgs boson is required to provide particle masses, but theorists are actively considering…
This article introduces Kerson Huang's theory on superfluid universe in these aspects: I. choose the asymptotically free Halpern-Huang scalar field(s) to drive inflation; II. use quantum turbulence to create matter; III. consider dark…
Black holes are extreme spacetime deformations where even light is imprisoned. There is an extensive astrophysical evidence for the real and abundant existence of these prisons of matter and light in the Universe. Mathematically, black…
This year marks half a century since Stephen Hawking made his greatest scientific discovery by theoretically proving that black holes aint so black, as they behave like hot bodies with an absolute temperature that depends inversely on their…
Two transformative waves of computing have redefined the way we approach science. The first wave came with the birth of the digital computer, which enabled scientists to numerically simulate their models and analyze massive datasets. This…
The first part of this lecture quickly touches upon some important but infrequently discussed issues in large extra dimension and warped extra dimension scenarios, with particular reference to effects in the early universe. The second part…
In these lectures I shall explain how a new-found nonabelian duality can be used to solve some outstanding questions in particle physics. The first lecture introduces the concept of electromagnetic duality and goes on to present its…
It is known that Einstein's conceptual base for his theory of relativity was the philosophy formulated by Immanuel Kant. Things appear differently to observers in different frames. However, Kant's Ding-an-Sich leads to the existence of the…
At the 1927 Solvay conference, Einstein presented a thought experiment intended to demonstrate the incompleteness of the quantum mechanical description of reality. In the following years, the thought experiment was picked up and modified by…
Between 1974 and 1975, Stephen Hawking revolutionized the world of physics by proposing that black holes have temperature, entropy, and evaporate gradually. The objective of this article is to offer a brief and updated introduction to these…
The $\Lambda$-CDM model of cosmology has done much to clarify our picture of the early universe. However, there are still some questions that $\Lambda$-CDM does not necessarily answer; questions such as what is the fundamental nature of…
In a previous article [1] we presented an argument to obtain (or rather infer) Born's rule, based on a simple set of axioms named "Contexts, Systems and Modalities" (CSM). In this approach there is no "emergence", but the structure of…