Related papers: Julian Schwinger (1918-1994)
John von Neumann's transformation from a logician of quantum mechanics (QM) in the 1920s to a natural philosopher of computation in the 1950s is discussed. The paper argues for revision of the historical image of Neumann to portray his…
This essay gives a short, informal account of the development of digital logic from the Pleistocene to the Manhattan Project, the introduction of reversible circuits, and Richard Feynman's allied proposal for quantum computing. We argue…
We consider the differential equation that Zernike proposed to classify aberrations of wavefronts in a circular pupil, whose value at the boundary can be nonzero. On this account the quantum Zernike system, where that differential equation…
Albert Einstein postulated the equivalence of energy and mass, developed the theory of special relativity, explained the photoelectric effect, and described Brownian motion in five papers, all published in 1905, 100 years ago. With these…
We briefly give a very simple picture about one of the most remarkable results of Matvej Petrovich Bronstein concerning the quantization of the gravitational waves showing also that the linearized Einstein equations of the paper: Phys.Rev.…
Stochastic mechanics (SM), as proposed by Edward Nelson and others in the 20th century, aims to reconstruct quantum mechanics (QM) from a more fundamental theory of classical point particles interacting with a classical-like ether, where…
It is argued that the conclusions obtained by Renninger (Zeitschrift fur Physik 136, 251 (1953)), by means of an interferometer thought experiment, have important implications for a number of still ongoing discussions about quantum…
The Schwinger equations of QED are rewritten in three different ways as integral equations involving functional derivatives, which are called weak field, strong field, and SCF quantum electrodynamics. The perturbative solutions of these…
We retrace an ab initio relativistic derivation of Maxwell's equations that was developed by Feynman in unpublished notes, clarifying the analogies and the differences with analogous treatments present in the literature. Unlike the latter,…
This note is based upon a talk given at a celebration in Austin Texas of the achievements of J. Willard Gibbs. J. Willard Gibbs, the younger, was the first American physical sciences theorist. He was one of the inventors of statistical…
It is known that Einstein's conceptual base for his theory of relativity was the philosophy formulated by Immanuel Kant. Things appear differently to observers in different frames. However, Kant's Ding-an-Sich leads to the existence of the…
Credible reasons are presented to reveal that many of the lingering century old enigmas, surrounding the behavior of at least an individual quantum particle, can be comprehended in terms of an objectively real specific wave function. This…
One way of obtaining a version of quantum mechanics without observers, and thus of solving the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, is to modify the Schroedinger evolution by implementing spontaneous collapses of the wave function. An explicit…
Several years ago Schwinger proposed a physical mechanism for sonoluminescence in terms of photon production due to changes in the properties of the quantum-electrodynamic (QED) vacuum arising from a collapsing dielectric bubble. This…
The path integral formalism gives a very illustrative and intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics but due to its difficult sum over phases one usually prefers Schr\"odinger's approach. We will show that it is possible to calculate…
James Burkett Hartle was a theoretical physicist who made major contributions to our understanding of relativistic stars, black holes, and cosmology. Most of his career, however, was devoted to studying the universe as a quantum system. As…
The 20th-century physics starts with Einstein and ends with Feynman. Einstein introduced the Lorentz-covariant world with E = mc^{2}. Feynman observed that fast-moving hadrons consist of partons which act incoherently with external signals.…
Feynman gave a famous elementary introduction to quantum theory by discussing the thin-film reflection of light. We make his discussion mathematically rigorous, keeping it elementary, using his other idea. The resulting model leads to…
We reexamine a unitary-transformation method of extracting a physical Hamiltonian from a gauge field theory after quantizing all degrees of freedom including redundant variables. We show that this {\it quantum Hamiltonian reduction} method…
This paper is an updated version of the paper of similar title published in September 1998 {21} modified to take into account recent experimental results and recommendations from CODATA {19} and also to incorporate a correction. The…