相关论文: John Archibald Wheeler: A Biographical Memoir

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…

Nobel Prize laureate P.J.E. Peebles [24] has emphasized the importance and difficulties of studying the large scale clustering of matter in cosmology. Nonlinear gravitational instability plays a central role in understanding the clustering…

The classic "Bell's Theorem" of Clauser, Holt, Shimony and Horne tells us that we must give up at least one of: (1) objective reality (aka "hidden variables"); (2) locality; or (3) time-forwards macroscopic statistics (aka "causality"). The…

In a seminal paper, Alcubierre showed that Einstein's theory of general relativity appears to allow a super-luminal motion. In the present study, we use a recent eternal-warp-drive solution found by Alcubierre to study the effect of Hawking…

I recall my interactions with Julian Schwinger, first as a graduate student at Harvard, and then as a postdoc at UCLA, in the period 1968--81, and subsequently. Some aspects of his legacy to physics are discussed.

The reality of Bohm's intellectual journey is very different from what is often claimed by the proponents of "Bohmian Mechanics" and others as we will explain in this paper. He did not believe a mechanical explanation of quantum phenomena…

Einstein at the Z\"urich Polytechnic: he skipped classes, did not attend all the lectures of his Professors, and before going to the examinations he studied instead from the notebooks of his good friend from class, Marcel Grossmann.…

As an attempt to realize Wheeler's "it-from-bit proposal" that physics should be reduced to simple yes-no questions we consider a model of loop quantum gravity, where the only allowed values of the quantum numbers $j_p$ at the punctures of…

Henry Eyring was, and still is, a towering figure in science. Some aspects of his life and science, beginning in Mexico and continuing in Arizona, California, Wisconsin, Germany, Princeton, and finally Utah, are reviewed here. Eyring moved…

Objections to pilot-wave theory frequently come in three mutually-contradictory categories: that the theory is too bizarrely different from ordinary physics, that the theory is not radically different enough, and that the physics of…

John Stewart Bell's famous 1964 theorem is widely regarded as one of the most important developments in the foundations of physics. It has even been described as "the most profound discovery of science." Yet even as we approach the 50th…

Lectures by the author at the 1986 Cargese summer school modestly corrected and uploaded for greater accessibility. Some of the author's views on the quantum mechanics of cosmology have changed from those presented here but may still be of…

In this work we consider some consequences of the Bohr-Sommerfeld-Hansson (Old or quasi-classical) quantum theory of the Newtonian gravity, i.e. of the "gravitational atom". We prove that in this case (for gravitational central force and…

Bohmian mechanics, also known as pilot-wave theory or de Broglie-Bohm theory, is a formulation of quantum mechanics whose fundamental axioms are not about what observers will see if they perform an experiment but about what happens in…

In his monumental discoveries, the driving force for Einstein was, I believe, consistency of concept and principle rather than conflict with experiment. In this spirit, I would like to look at the journey from the classical to the…

This document is the Ph.D. thesis of Leonard Parker, submitted to Harvard University in 1966. Over the decades, several generations of physicists have been introduced to the concept of particle creation by gravitational fields, a phenomenon…

Cornelis ("Kees") de Jager, co-founder of "Solar Physics", passed away in 2021. He was an exemplary human being, a great scientist, and had large impact on our field. In this tribute we first briefly summarize his life and career and then…

The quantum "mystery which cannot go away" (in Feynman's words) of wave-particle duality is illustrated in a striking way by Wheeler's delayed-choice GedankenExperiment. In this experiment, the configuration of a two-path interferometer is…

Einstein is considered by many as the father of quantum physics in some sense. Yet there is an unshakable view that he was wrong on quantum physics. Although it may be a subject of considerable debate, the core of his allegedly wrong…

Abner Shimony was an exceptional human being and a remarkably lucid and penetrating thinker whose work centered on some of the most significant physical and philosophical questions of his era at their nexus. He approached these questions…