Related papers: Julian Schwinger (1918-1994)
A scientific biography of John Ward, who was responsible for the Ward Identity in quantum electrodynamics; the first detailed calculation of the quantum entanglement of two photons in electron-positron annihilation with Maurice Pryce; the…
In his famous undergraduate physics lectures, Richard Feynman remarked about the problem of fluid turbulence: "Nobody in physics has really been able to analyze it mathematically satisfactorily in spite of its importance to the sister…
One usually refers the concept of Feynman path integral to the work of Norbert Wiener on Brownian motion in the early 1920s. This view is not false and we show in this article that Wiener used the first path integral of the history of…
The unification of electricity and magnetism achieved by special relativity has remained for decades a model of unification in theoretical physics. We discuss the relationship between electric and magnetic fields from a classical point of…
In 1963-71, a group of people, myself included, formulated and perfected a new approach to physics problems, which eventually came to be known under the names of scaling, universality, and renormalization. This work formed the basis of a…
Two of the major achievements of Stephen Hawking are described in elementary terms. They are his work on the beginning of the universe and his work on the end of black holes. These are perhaps the scientific achievements for which he is…
Stephen Hawkings most important scientific contribution was his theoretical discovery that black holes aint so black, since they emit thermal radiation as if they were hot bodies with an absolute temperature known as the Hawking…
The Jarzynski equality (JE) is a remarkable statement relating transient irreversible processes to infinite-time free energy differences. Although twenty years old, the JE remains unfamiliar to many; nevertheless it is a robust and powerful…
From its seemingly non-intuitive and puzzling nature, most evident in numerous EPR-like gedankenexperiments to its almost ubiquitous presence in quantum technologies, entanglement is at the heart of modern quantum physics. First introduced…
Dawning neutron physics was more complex than one might expect. The chance that the neutron comprised a proton and an electron was diffusely taken into account after the discovery of the neutron. Moreover, uncertainties persisted about the…
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks." As noted by the Nobel committee, their work moved…
Hideki Yukawa, Sin-itiro Tomonaga and Shoichi Sakata pioneered nuclear and particle physics and left enduring legacies. Their friendly collaboration and severe competition laid the foundation to bring up the active postwar generation of…
Schroedinger's great discovery of wave mechanics in 1926 - his annus mirabilis - is discussed in detail. Beside the six most important papers that appeared during the first half of 1926, letters between Schroedinger and leading physicists…
The last Nobel Prize of the Millenium in Physics has been awarded jointly to Professor Gerardus 't Hooft of the University of Utrecht in Holland and his thesis advisor Professor Emeritus Martinus J.G. Veltman of Holland. According to the…
In December 1924 Wolfgang Pauli proposed the idea of an inner degree of freedom of the electron, which he insisted should be thought of as genuinely quantum mechanical in nature. Shortly thereafter Ralph Kronig and, independently, Samuel…
Schroedinger's first proposal for the interpretation of quantum mechanics was based on a postulate relating the wave function on configuration space to charge density in physical space. Schroedinger apparently later thought that his…
One of the common features in all promising candidates of quantum gravity is the existence of a minimal length scale, which naturally emerges with a generalized uncertainty principle, or equivalently a modified commutation relation.…
This memoir honors the late Berni Julian Alder, who inspired both of us with his pioneering development of molecular dynamics. Berni's work with Tom Wainwright, described in the 1959 Scientific American[1], brought Bill to interview at…
Peter Higgs was a British theoretical physicist, famous for his work published in 1964, where he proposed a mechanism that can generate masses for elementary particles, while respecting gauge invariance. Half a century later, two…
A brief review of Heisenberg's life and work: participating in the youth movement in the aftermath of World War I, creating quantum mechanics, conflict with "deutsche Physik", involvement in "Hitler's Uranium Project", last illusions.…