Related papers: Physicists and the 1945 Decision to Drop the Bomb
After World War II, a hyper-pragmatic paradigm was established in physics in most of the western countries, within which foundations of quantum mechanics were vastly dismissed as pointless speculations. In this paper, we show that in Italy,…
We give a detailed account of the recent retrieval of a consistent amount (about 600 pages) of documents written by Enrico Fermi and/or his collaborators, coming from different sources previously unexplored. These documents include…
In the past hundred years, chaos has always been a mystery to human beings, including the butterfly effect discovered in 1963 and the dissipative structure theory which won the chemistry Nobel Prize in 1977. So far, there is no quantitative…
If you have a restless intellect, it is very likely that you have played at some point with the idea of investigating the meaning and conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics. It is also probable (albeit not certain) that your intentions…
We provided an introduction to transition state theory and the connections it provides between atomic and celestial physics. We include brief discussions of historical background, recent applications in space mission design, and current…
The onset and the development of the concept of exchange force in quantum physics are historically reconstructed, starting from Heisenberg's seminal contributions in 1926 and going through the great developments in nuclear physics, which…
The threat posed to humanity by global warming has led scientists to question the nature of their activities and the need to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from research. Until now, most studies have aimed at quantifying the carbon…
We have two aims. The main one is to expound the idea of renormalization in quantum field theory, with no technical prerequisites (Sections 2 and 3). Our motivation is that renormalization is undoubtedly one of the great ideas, and great…
Quantum physics in the 20th century was proposed to understand the phenomenology of atomic world at short length scale (below one nanometer) and it was developed to study nuclear and subnuclear world at the lowest possible spatial scale and…
Quantum mechanics---the theory describing the fundamental workings of nature---is famously counterintuitive: it predicts that a particle can be in two places at the same time, and that two remote particles can be inextricably and…
The purpose of the conference (the fourth in the series of Vaxjo conferences) was to bring together scientists (physicists, mathematicians and philosophers) who are interested in foundations of quantum physics. An emphasis was made on both…
In 1945 Einstein concluded that [1]: 'The present theory of relativity is based on a division of physical reality into a metric field (gravitation) on the one hand, and into an electromagnetic field and matter on the other hand. In reality…
Nuclear energy technologies have the potential to help mitigate climate change. However, these technologies face many challenges, including high costs, societal concern and opposition, and health, safety, environmental and proliferation…
The recent nuclear accident in Japan revealed the confusion and the inadequate knowledge of the citizens about the issues of nuclear energy, nuclear applications, radioactivity and their consequences In this work we present the first…
While the migration of scientists from the Soviet Union to the West occurred at a modest pace during the 1970s and 1980s, the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 and the ensuing economic and social hardships precipitated a massive exodus that…
The High Energy Physics community can benefit from a natural synergy in research activities into next-generation large-scale water and scintillator neutrino detectors, now being studied for remote reactor monitoring, discovery and exclusion…
Why is it interesting to try to understand the origin of the universe? Everything we observe today, including our existence, arose from that event. Although we still do not have a theory that allows us to describe the origin itself, the…
In recent years, nuclear physics has benefited greatly from the development of powerful ab initio many-body methods and their combination with interactions from chiral effective field theory. With increasing computational power and…
The climate crisis demands innovative solutions and quantum technologies are considered by some a potential solution (Berger et al., 2021; Calvin et al., 2023). The United Nations declared 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and…
An atom in front of a surface is one of the simplest and fundamental problem in physics. Yet, it allows testing quantum electrodynamics, while providing potential platforms and interfaces for quantum technologies. Despite, its simplicity,…