Related papers: RIP: The Macho Era (1974-2004)
The first part of this report gives a very quick sketch of how string theory concepts originated and evolved during its first 25 years (1968-93). The second part presents a somewhat more detailed discussion of the highlights of the past…
Analyzing 13,455 journals listed in the Journal Citation Report (Thomson Reuters) from 1997 through 2013, we report that the mean cited half-life of the scholarly literature is 6.5 years and growing at a rate of 0.13 years per annum.…
The work is divided into three sections: the first one describes the historical evolution of the main arguments presented about the plurality of inhabited worlds, from the presocratics to the birth of modern science. The second section…
Consider the scenario, in which human civilization undergoes periodic eras of progression and regression, and consequently, changes in cosmological knowledge are cyclic. There exist solutions of general theory of relativity, such as the…
The quest for historically impactful science and technology provides invaluable insight into the innovation dynamics of human society, yet many studies are limited to qualitative and small-scale approaches. Here, we investigate scientific…
We outline the course of affairs in the experimental and theoretical fields of nuclear and particle physics which determined its finale, and give several fragmentary remarks on its present state. The essay tells about events and their…
If we assume that the cosmic energy density will remain constant or strictly increase in the future, then the possible fates for the universe can be divided into four categories based on the time asymptotics of the Hubble parameter H(t):…
Despite the apparent cross-disciplinary interactions among scientific fields, a formal description of their evolution is lacking. Here we describe a novel approach to study the dynamics and evolution of scientific fields using a…
We develop a ``unified'' model that describes both ``micro'' and ``macro'' evolutions within a single theoretical framework. The eco-system is described as a dynamic network; the population dynamics at each node of this network describes…
A transcription with minor alterations of the talk presented to honor Sid Drell on the occasion of his retirement.
We review the history of several homological conjectures, both from a chronological and a methodological point of view.
According to physicist David Mermin, the science wars was a series of exchanges between scientists and "sociologists, historians, and literary critics" whom the scientists thought to be "ludicrously ignorant of science, making all kinds of…
The paper outlines the historical development of spin in physics from about 1920 to the present day. It aims to provide the student with an accurate chronology of important developments, both scientific and technical.
Based on a new theory of causality [1] and its development to the theory of the Universe [2], we show, in this paper, new ideas for building a theory of everything.
We study the statistics of citations from all Physical Review journals for the 110-year period 1893 until 2003. In addition to characterizing the citation distribution and identifying publications with the highest citation impact, we…
This paper outlines astrophysical issues related to the long term fate of the universe. We consider the evolution of planets, stars, stellar populations, galaxies, and the universe itself over time scales which greatly exceed the current…
We review the accomplishments of nuclear theory during the past five years and identify the future challenges and research opportunities. [Final, substantially revised version of the nuclear theory white paper]
We bring you, as usual, the Sun and Moon and stars, plus some galaxies and a new section on astrobiology. Some highlights are short (the newly identified class of gamma-ray bursts, and the Deep Impact on Comet 9P/ Tempel 1), some long (the…
This review is an introduction to theoretical models and mathematical calculations for biological evolution, aimed at physicists. The methods in the field are naturally very similar to those used in statistical physics, although the…
This paper provides, from one side, a review of the theory of the cosmological mass function from a theoretical point of view, starting from the seminal paper of Press & Shechter (1974) to the last developments (Del Popolo & Gambera (1998,…