Related papers: Julian Schwinger (1918-1994)
The introduction of chiral effective field theory by Steven Weinberg three decades ago has had a profound and lasting impact on nuclear physics. This brief review explores the impact of Weinberg's work on the field of nuclear lattice…
Yurii Fedorovich Smirnov (1935-2008) was a famous theoretical physicist. He achieved his career mainly at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of Moscow. These notes describe some particular facets of the contributions of the late Professor…
Dealing with Eugene Wigner's ideas on the measurement procedure in quantum physics and unearthing the controversy that pitted him against supporters of the interpretation of complementarity, I will show how Wigner and his followers…
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 has been awarded to John Clarke, John Martinis, and Michel Devoret for "the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit". Their achievements open up…
Erwin Louis Hahn was one of the most innovative and influential physical scientists in recent history, impacting generations of scientists through his work in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), optics, and the intersection of these two…
We discuss a previously unpublished description of electromagnetism outlined by Richard P. Feynman in the 1960s in five handwritten pages, recently uncovered among his papers, and partly developed in later lectures. Though similar to the…
The purpose of this paper is to construct a quantum field theory suitable for describing quantum electrodynamics and Yang-Mills theory in a form which satisfies the conditions of the Millennium prize offered by the Clay Mathematics…
The von Neumann attitude on such a deep interpretational question as the role of a human observer in order for the quantum description of measurement to be consistent has been long misrepresented. The large majority of the subsequent…
Renormalization began as a tool to eliminate divergences in quantum electrodynamics but it is now the basis of our understanding of physics at different energy scales. I review its evolution with an eye towards physics beyond the Wilsonian…
Stirling Colgate was a remarkably imaginative physicist, an independent thinker with a wide breadth of interests and contagious enthusiasm, a born leader with enduring drive to attack fundamental problems in science. Among his many…
Recently there has been an explosion of books and articles complaining about the weirdness of Quantum Mechanics and crying out for a solution. Three problems in particular have been singled out: the double-slit experiment, the measurement…
The direct interaction theory of electromagnetism, also known as Wheeler-Feynman electrodynamics, is often misinterpreted and found unappealing because of its reference to the absorber and, more importantly, to the so-called absorber…
In this contribution to the special issue "Celebrating 30 years of Steven Weinberg's papers on Nuclear Forces from Chiral Lagrangians," we emphasize the important role chiral effective field theory has played in leading nuclear physics into…
Abdus Salam was a true master of 20th Century Theoretical Physics. Not only was he a pioneer of the Standard Model (for which he shared the Nobel Prize with S. Glashow and S.Weinberg), but he also (co)authored many other outstanding…
The idea of atoms is old but X-rays provided the first probe into the physical atom. Photographs of X-ray scattering from crystals -Laue spots- were the first visual proof for the physical existence of atoms arranged in a perfect geometric…
After some brief biographical notes, Wolfgang Pauli's main contributions to general relativity, quantum theory, quantum field theory, and elementary particle physics are reviewed. A detailed description is given how Pauli descovered -…
In the year 1905 Albert Einstein published four papers that raised him to a giant in the history of science of all times. These works encompass the photon hypothesis (for which he obtained the Nobel prize in 1921), his first two papers on…
Quantum Mechanics (QM) has faced deep controversies and debates since its origin when Werner Heisenberg proposed the first mathematical formalism capable to operationally account for what had been recently discovered as the new field of…
In this contribution we report about Feynman's approach to gravitation, starting from the records of his interventions at the Chapel Hill Conference of 1957. As well known, Feynman was concerned about the relation of gravitation with the…
After recalling episodes from Pascual Jordan's biography including his pivotal role in the shaping of quantum field theory and his much criticized conduct during the NS regime, I draw attention to his presentation of the first phase of…