Related papers: The Nobel Prize in Physics 1999

A physically real wave associated with any moving particle and travelling in a surrounding material medium was introduced by Louis de Broglie in a series of short notes in 1923 and in a more complete form in his thesis defended in Paris on…

The biggest and most lasting among David Bohm's (1917-1992) many achievements is to have proposed a picture of reality that explains the empirical rules of quantum mechanics. This picture, known as pilot wave theory or Bohmian mechanics…

Quantum mechanics, one of the most successful theories in the history of science, was created to account for physical systems not describable by classical physics. Though it is consistent with all experiments conducted thus far, many of its…

The reader surely knows what particles physics is about: finding building blocks of nature that appear elementary at a given time and study their interactions - so why in the world this essay? The problem is how to arrive at a fundamental…

The complementary wave and particle character of quantum objects (or quantons) was pointed out by Niels Bohr. This wave-particle duality, in the context of the two-slit experiment, is now described not just as two extreme cases of wave and…

Quantum physics, which describes the strange behavior of light and matter at the smallest scales, is one of the most successful descriptions of reality, yet it is notoriously inaccessible. Here we provide an approachable explanation of…

After a very brief review of twentieth century elementary particle physics, prospects for the next century are discussed. First and most important are technological limits of opportunities; next, the future experimental program, and finally…

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics has been awarded annually since 1969. Who wins the prize is a topic of much interest and tracks the whole course of the academic discipline over the last 57 years. Explaining who wins the prize in any…

Philosophers have spilled much ink over the discovery of ideas in the classical 'context of discovery'. However, there has been little engagement with the question of what constitutes a discovery of 'things in the world'. A much-overlooked…

Ninety years ago in 1927, at an international congress in Como, Italy, Niels Bohr gave an address which is recognized as the first instance in which the term "complementarity", as a physical concept, was spoken publicly [1], revealing…

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…

Global celebration greeted the 2012 discovery at CERN's Large Hadron Collider of a particle that matches the textbook description of the Higgs boson. That achievement validated a remarkable chain of theoretical reasoning that combined the…

The 2021 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Giorgio Parisi ``for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales,'' and the 2024 Abel Prize in mathematics was awarded to…

Since the particles such as molecules, atoms and nuclei are composite particles, it is important to recognize that physics must be invariant for the composite particles and their constituent particles, this requirement is called particle…

This article reviews recent developments in tests of fundamental physics using atoms and molecules, including the subjects of parity violation, searches for permanent electric dipole moments, tests of the CPT theorem and Lorentz symmetry,…

We review the physics at the end of the nineteenth century and summarize the process of the establishment of Special Relativity by Albert Einstein in brief. Following in the giant's footsteps, we outline the scientific method which helps to…

The past few years have seen dramatic breakthroughs and spectacular and puzzling discoveries in astrophysics and cosmology. In many cases, the new observations can only be explained with the introduction of new fundamental physics. Here we…

This paper deals with the ways that the issue of completing quantum mechanics was brought into laboratories and became a topic in mainstream quantum optics. It focuses on the period between 1965, when Bell published what now we call Bell's…

Classical physics has enabled the acquisition of significant knowledge of the physical properties of nature on a standard macroscopic scale. These achievements were driven by use of the causal ontological approach (proposed originally by…

I present a concise review of the major issues and challenges in particle physics at the start of the LHC era. After a brief overview of the Standard Model and of QCD, I will focus on the electroweak symmetry breaking problem which plays a…