Related papers: What happened to modern physics?
Modern physics is largely defined by fundamental symmetry principles and Noether's Theorem. Yet these are not taught, or rarely mentioned, to beginning students, thus missing an opportunity to reveal that the subject of physics is as lively…
This introductory text on the basics of quantum mechanics is intended to serve as a kind of travel guide through the quantum world. It starts by asking whether quantum physics is important, or weird, or incomprehensible. It explains why…
Einstein's general relativity is increasingly important in contemporary physics on the frontiers of both the very largest distance scales (astrophysics and cosmology) and the very smallest(elementary particle physics). This paper makes the…
More than hundred years ago the 'classic physics' was it in its full power, with just a few unexplained phenomena; which however led to a revolution and the development of the 'modern physics'. Today the computing is in a similar position:…
Physical science has changed in the century since Lord Kelvin's celebrated essay on Nineteenth Century Clouds over the Dynamical Theory of Heat and Light, but some things are the same. Analogs in what was happening in physics then and what…
Following a courageous denunciation by Barton Richter in {\it Physics Today,} November 2006, of contemporary particle physics as being "theological speculations," we present insufficiencies of special relativity, quantum mechanics,…
General relativity and quantum mechanics are perhaps the two most successful theories of the XXth century. Despite their impressive accurate predictions, they are both valid at their own scales and do not seem to be expressible using the…
This progress report covers recent developments in the area of quantum randomness, which is an extraordinarily interdisciplinary area that belongs not only to physics, but also to philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and technology.…
While purely philosophical in the early times, and still very speculative at the beginning of the twentieth century, Cosmology has gradually entered into the realm of experimental science over the past eighty years. It has raised some…
General relativity and quantum mechanics have both revealed the relativity of certain notions that were previously thought to be absolute. I clarify the precise sense in which these theories are relational, and I argue that the various…
To date, quantum mechanics has proven to be our most successful theoretical model. However, it is still surrounded by a "mysterious halo" that can be summarized in a simple but challenging question: Why quantum phenomena are not understood…
We present a list of open questions in mathematical physics. After a historical introduction, a number of problems in a variety of different fields are discussed, with the intention of giving an overall impression of the current status of…
Whereas physics in the period from about 1880 to 1910 experienced a steady growth, it was also a revolutionary period in which the foundations of the physical world picture were criticized and reconsidered. Generally speaking, from about…
Although general relativity is a predictively successful theory, it treats matter as classical rather than as quantum. For this reason, it will have to be replaced by a more fundamental quantum theory of gravity. Attempts to formulate a…
The developments of special relativity and quantum mechanics marked the beginning of the modern physics age. The former has taught us that while space and time are frame dependent notions, there is a quantity -- the space-time interval --…
Modern physics is based on three major theories - general relativity, quantum field theory, and (quantum) thermodynamics. Classical acoustics in fluids is usually regarded and studied as a part of classical mechanics, more precisely fluid…
It is widely hoped that quantum gravity will shed light on the question of the origin of time in physics. The currently dominant approaches to a candidate quantum theory of gravity have naturally evolved from general relativity, on the one…
Wave-particle duality, wave function collapse, objective probability and nonlocality constitute four prominent puzzles in modern physics. Although these four topics may appear unrelated, a closer examination reveals that they do share some…
In fundamental physics, this has been the century of quantum mechanics and general relativity. It has also been the century of the long search for a conceptual framework capable of embracing the astonishing features of the world that have…
Studying quantum physics in upper secondary school is now a standard practice (Stadermann et al., 2019). But given the context of science education, with low recruitment numbers in higher education and poor attitudes towards science, it…