Related papers: Julian Schwinger (1918-1994)
In his 1916's first paper on gravitational waves Einstein began to speculate on interactions between the principles of the old quantum theory and his theory of gravitation. With this contribution Einstein has stimulated a lot of similar…
It is shown that many dissipative phenomena of "old" quantum mechanics which appeared 100 years ago in the form of the statistics of quantum thermal noise and quantum spontaneous jumps, have never been explained by the "new" conservative…
The American physicist Robert Dicke (1916-1997) is primarily known for his important contributions to gravitation, cosmology, and microwave physics. Much less known is his work in geophysics and related areas of the earth sciences in which…
The radical changes in the concepts and approach in Physics at the turn of the Nineteenth century were so deep, that is acknowledged as a revolution. However, in 1970 Thomas Kuhn's careful reconstruction of the researches on the black body…
Between 1941 and 1962, scalar-tensor theories of gravitation were suggested four times by different scientists in four different countries. The earliest originator, the Swiss mathematician W. Scherrer, was virtually unknown until now…
Year 2005 was the World Year of Physics, and it was commemorated worldwide as the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's legendary works in which the foundations of at least three areas of modern physics were laid: statistical mechanics,…
The evolution of light theories began with Isaac Newton's corpuscular model, which explained reflection and refraction but could not account for diffraction and interference. In contrast, Christiaan Huygens proposed a wave theory,…
Exactly a century ago, wave quantum mechanics was born in Arosa, Switzerland. Erwin Schr\"{o}dinger was vacationing in this classic Swiss Alps town at Christmas 1925 when he made his breakthrough discovery of the wave equation…
In his seminal part IV, Ann. der Phys. Vol 81, 1926 paper, Schrodinger has developed a clear understanding about the wave equation that produces the correct quadratic dispersion relation for matter-waves and he first presents a real-valued…
We discuss the influential role of Niels Bohr's work in the anti-realist realist re-foundation of physics that took place during the 20th century. We will focus in how, developing the modern co-relational matrix of scientific understanding,…
Ya.B. Zeldovich was a pre-eminent Soviet physicist whose seminal contributions spanned many fields ranging from physical chemistry to nuclear and particle physics, and finally astrophysics and cosmology. March 8, 2014 marks Zeldovich's…
These lectures illustrate the key ideas of modern renormalization theory and effective field theories in the context of simple nonrelativistic quantum mechanics and the Schr\"odinger equation. They also discuss problems in QED, QCD and…
Einstein regarded as one of the triumphs of his 1915 theory of gravity --- the general theory of relativity --- that it vindicated the action--reaction principle, while Newtonian mechanics as well as his 1905 special theory of relativity…
One of the most important philosophers in history, the German Friedrich Nietzsche, is almost ignored by physicists. This author who declared the death of God in the 19th century was a science enthusiast, especially in the second period of…
When speaking of the unification of quantum mechanics and relativity, one normally refers to special relativity (SR) or to Einstein general relativity (GR). The Dirac and Klein-Gordon wave equations are an example of unification of quantum…
Quantum mechanics is one of the basic theories of modern physics. Here, the famous Schr\"odinger equation and the differential operators representing mechanical quantities in quantum mechanics are derived, just based on the principle that…
In 1926, Erwin Schrodinger wrote a series of papers that invented wave mechanics and set the foundation for much of the single-particle quantum mechanics that we teach today. In his first paper, he solved the Schrodinger equation using the…
We discuss, from a historiographical point of view, which was the degree of certainty that the physicists directly involved in the birth of Quantum Mechanics (Heisenberg, Born, Jordan, Dirac and Schr\"odinger) gave to the atomistic…
In 1918, H. Weyl proposed a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism based on a generalization of Riemannian geometry. With hindsight we now could say that the theory carried with it some of the most original ideas that inspired the…
When about half a century ago the concept of universal spontaneous collapse of the wave function was conceived it was an attempt to alter standard non-relativistic quantum physics. As such, it was largely ignored by relativistic field…