Related papers: The Nobel Prize in Physics 1999
The observational evidence for the recent acceleration of the universe demonstrates that canonical theories of cosmology and particle physics are incomplete---if not incorrect---and that new physics is out there, waiting to be discovered. A…
When most people think of physics, they think of what they learned in high school physics: that the world is fundamentally predictable. Given the position and velocity of a particle in space, it should be possible to predict its position at…
This is an essay sketching the line of thinking which has led the present author to propose the constituent or atomic model of gravitation more than a decade ago. It turns out that viewing the problem of gravitation as a quantum many body…
In 1996 Lee, Osheroff and Richardson received the Nobel Prize for their 1971 discovery of superfluid helium 3 -- a discovery which opened the door to the most fascinating system known in condensed matter physics. The superfluid phases of…
We study the quantization of a model proposed by Newton to explain centripetal force namely, that of a particle moving on a regular polygon. The exact eigenvalues and eigenfunctions are obtained. The quantum mechanics of a particle moving…
In 2002, Ray Davis and Masatoshi Koshiba were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics ``for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos.'' However, while astronomy has undergone a revolution in…
Our present understanding of elementary particle interactions is the synergic result of developments of theoretical ideas and of experimental advances that lead to the theory known as the Standard Model of particle physics. Despite the…
I present a concise review of where we stand in particle physics today. First, I will discuss the status of the Standard Model, its open problems and the expected answers from the LHC. Then I will briefly review the avenues for New Physics…
Discovery of the J Particle at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Physics of Electrons and Positrons; The Standard Model Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow; The Rise of Gauge Theories: From Many Models to One Theory; From Charm to CP…
The origin of quantum physics was the discovery of the base unit of electromagnetic action $h$ by Max Planck in 1900 when he analyzed the experimental results of the black body radiation. This permitted Albert Einstein a few years later to…
The 2020 Nobel prize in Physics has revived the interest in the singularity theorems and, in particular, in the Penrose theorem published in 1965. In this short paper I briefly review the main ideas behind the theorems and then proceed to…
Matter waves were discovered in the early 20th century from their wavelength, predicted by DeBroglie, Planck's constant divided by the particle's momentum, that is, lmw = h/mv. But, the failure to obtain a reasonable theory for the matter…
In 1916 Einstein introduced the first rules for a quantum theory of electromagnetic radiation, and he applied them to a model of matter in thermal equilibrium with radiation to derive Planck's black-body formula. Einstein's treatment is…
Bohmian mechanics, also known as pilot-wave theory or de Broglie-Bohm theory, is a formulation of quantum mechanics whose fundamental axioms are not about what observers will see if they perform an experiment but about what happens in…
** The primary topic of this dissertation is the study of the relationships between parts and wholes as described by particular physical theories, namely generalized probability theories in a quasi-classical physics framework and…
We present a concise review of where we stand in particle physics today. First we discuss QCD, then the electroweak sector and finally the motivations and the avenues for new physics beyond the Standard Model.
A survey is made of selected topics in flavour physics where real progress is expected in the coming half-decade, paying particular attention to those where New Physics signals may appear.
With the discovery of the Higgs boson the LHC experiments have closed the most important gap in our understanding of fundamental interactions. We now know that the interactions between elementary particles can be described by quantum field…
The kinetic theory of Maxwell and Boltzmann has been the subject of major scientific controversies. The alleged incompatibility between the reversible nature of the equations of classical mechanics and the increase of entropy, which, in the…
We recount the successful long career of classical physics, from Newton to Einstein, which was based on the philosophy of scientific realism. Special emphasis is given to the changing status and number of ontological entitities and…