Related papers: Wigner's Sisters
Eugene Wigner famously argued for the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" for describing physics and other natural sciences in his 1960 essay. That essay has now led to some 55 years of (sometimes anguished) soul searching ---…
In 1972, at a symposium celebrating the 70th birthday of Paul Dirac, John Wheeler proclaimed that "the framework falls down for everything that one has ever called a law of physics". Responsible for this "breakage [...] among the laws of…
Steven Weinberg was a giant of late 20th Century physics on whose shoulders we stand while groping for the science of the 21st Century. This article provides a too-brief summary of a selection of his many achievements -- eight decades of…
"Wigner's friend" refers to a quantum process of which different observers, following the rules of quantum mechanics, give contradictory descriptions. Lostaglio and Bowles have recently claimed to describe a classical system showing the…
In 1929 Lanczos showed how to derive Dirac's equation from a more fundamental system that predicted that spin 1/2 particles should come in pairs. Today, these pairs can unambiguously be interpreted as isospin doublets. From the same…
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…
Expressing the Wigner distribution function in Dirac notation reveals its resemblance to a classical trajectory in phase space.
We consider the fate of the Wigner crystal state in a two dimensional system of massive Dirac electrons as the effective fine structure constant $\alpha$ is increased. In a Dirac system, larger $\alpha$ naively corresponds to stronger…
In this lecture I will report on some recent progress in understanding the relation of Dirac operators on Clifford modules over an even-dimensional closed Riemannian manifold $M$\ and (euclidean) Einstein-Yang-Mills-Higgs models.
The Dirac equation is one of the most fundamental equations of modern physics. It is a spinor equation, but some tensor equivalents of the equation were proposed previously. Those equivalents were either nonlinear or involved several…
Since the particles such as molecules, atoms and nuclei are composite particles, it is important to recognize that physics must be invariant for the composite particles and their constituent particles, this requirement is called particle…
We study vacuum polarization due to strong fields, in the presence of an electron-positron plasma. For this purpose, we expand quantum kinetic equations using weak fields and slow temporal scales as expansion parameters. It is demonstrated…
The teaching of modern physics often uses the history of physics as a didactic tool. However, as in this process the history of physics is not something studied but used, there is a danger that the history itself will be distorted in, as…
The Dirac equation is deduced from the probability properties by the Poincare group transformations.
Drawing inspiration from Dirac's work on functions of non commuting observables, we develop a fresh approach to phase space descriptions of operators and the Wigner distribution in quantum mechanics. The construction presented here is…
Using Dirac equation together with the Wigner distribution function,the trembling motion,known as Zitterbewegung effect,of moving electrons in quasi-one-dimensional relativistic quantum plasma is theoretically investigated.The relativistic…
Symplectic unitary representations for the Poincar\'{e} group are studied. The formalism is based on the noncommutative structure of the star-product, and using group theory approach as a guide, a consistent physical theory in phase space…
The connection between spin and symmetry was established by Wigner in his 1939 paper on the Poincar\'e group. For a massive particle at rest, the little group is O(3) from which the concept of spin emerges. The little group for a massless…
A pedagogical introduction to the Dirac equation for massive particles in Rindler space is presented. The spin connection coefficients are explicitly derived using techniques from general relativity. We then apply the Lagrange-Green…
On January 4, 2012, the centenary of Henri Poincar\'e's death, a colloquium was held in Nancy, France the subject of which was "Vers une biographie d'Henri Poincar\'e". Scholars discussed several approaches for writing a biography of…