Related papers: Topology and physics-a historical essay
A century ago, nuclear physics entered astrophysics, giving birth to a new field of science referred to as "Nuclear Astrophysics". With time, it developed at an impressive pace into a vastly inter- and multidisciplinary discipline bringing…
We introduce the special issue on the Statistical Mechanics of Climate published on the Journal of Statistical Physics by presenting an informal discussion of some theoretical aspects of climate dynamics that make it a topic of great…
Starting with Einstein's famous papers of 1905, we review some of the ensuing developments and their impact on present-day physics. We attempt to cover topics that are of interest to historians and philosophers of science as well as to…
A brief account of some recent controversies about the teaching and learning of physics is presented. A shorter version of this outcome was accepted by The Physics Teacher, but publication is still pending.
This paper is devoted to problems stated by Z. Zhou and F. Li in 2009. They concern relations between almost periodic, weakly almost periodic, and quasi-weakly almost periodic points of a continuous map f and its topological entropy. The…
One of the goals that physicists have been pursuing is to get the same explanation from different angles for the same phenomenon, so as to realize the unity of basic physical laws. Geometry, classical mechanics and classical thermodynamics…
Issues relevant to the flow chirality and structure are focused, while the new theoretical results, including even a distinctive theory, are introduced. However, it is hope that the presentation, with a low starting point but a steep rise,…
This article has a twofold purpose. On the one hand I would like to draw attention to some nice exercises on the Kepler laws, due to Otto Laporte from 1970. Our discussion here has a more geometric flavour than the original analytic…
Non commutative geometry is creating new possibilities for physics. Quantum spacetime geometry and post inflationary models of the universe with matter creation have an enormous range of scales of time, distance and energy in between. There…
This paper is an expanded version of a talk given at the XIX International Colloquium on Group Theoretical Methods in Physics, Salamanca, July, 1992. We discuss the geometry of topological terms in classical actions, which by themselves…
This is a paper written for the wider physics community, not necessarily experts in turbulence.
This book is a valuable introduction to astrophyscial plasmas and fluids for graduate students of astronomy preparing either for a research career in the field or just aspiring to achieve a decent degree of familiarity with 99% of the…
This paper is mostly a collection of ideas already published by various authors, some of them even a long time ago. Its intention is to bring the reader to know some rather unknown papers of different fields that merit interest and to show…
An introduction to modern theories for the origin of structure in the Universe is given. After a brief review of the growth of cosmological perturbations in an expanding Universe and a summary of some important observational results, the…
Some general considerations on the notion of entropy in physics are presented. An attempt is made to clarify the question of the differentiation between physical entropy (the Clausius-Boltzmann one) and quantities called entropies…
Do the spacetime manifolds which feature in our best scientific theories reflect anything metaphysically weighty in the world (e.g., any fundamental substances or relations)? Should we extend our notions of space and time beyond the…
Despite its apparent complexity, our world seems to be governed by simple laws of physics. This volume provides a philosophical introduction to such laws. I explain how they are connected to some of the central issues in philosophy, such as…
Isaac Newton's book 'Opticks' from the 18th century includes several hypotheses on the structure of matter. Most of the hypotheses were confirmed during the 19th and 20th centuries at the scale of atoms and molecules. Conflicts appear…
Here I discuss ideas that makes a synthesis of topology and probability theory. The idea is the following: given a set $X$, assign a number $p(A)\in [0,1]$ for any subset $A$ of $X$. We can interpret $p(A)$ as the probability of openness of…
This is a survey article for the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Physics, 2nd Edition. Topological defects are described in the context of the 2-dimensional Ising model on the lattice, in 2-dimensional quantum field theory, in topological…