相关论文: To see a world in a grain of sand

During the period identified as the Rebirth of General Relativity, John Wheeler was instrumental in retrieving the physics of gravity that had become hidden behind the mathematical formalism. For Wheeler himself the change in point of view…

The reader surely knows what particles physics is about: finding building blocks of nature that appear elementary at a given time and study their interactions - so why in the world this essay? The problem is how to arrive at a fundamental…

John Wheeler advocated the principle that information is the foundation of physics and asked us to reformulate physics in terms of bits. The goal is to consider what we know already and work out a new mathematical theory in which space,…

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…

During the conference on the methods of differential geometry in physics in Warsaw in June 1976, Professor Wheeler gave an interview for the Czechoslovak Journal of Physics A. After Professor Wheeler authorized the English version in…

John Wheeler devised a gedanken experiment in which a piece of apparatus can be altered just before the arrival of particle, and this ``delayed choice'' can, seemingly, alter the quantum state of the particle at a much earlier time, long…

In his famous 1989 It from Bit essay, John Wheeler contends that the stuff of the physical universe, or it, arises from information or bits, encoded in yes or no answers. Wheeler's question and assumptions are reexamined from a post Aspect…

John Archibald Wheeler was a theoretical physicist who worked on both down-to-earth projects and highly speculative ideas, and always emphasized the importance of experiment and observation, even when speculating wildly. His research and…

A brief overview of loop quantum cosmology of homogeneous isotropic models is presented with emphasis on the origin of and subtleties associated with the resolution of big bang and big crunch singularities. These results bear out the…

Observed physical phenomena can be described well by quantum mechanics or general relativity. People may try to find an unified fundamental theory which mainly aims to merge gravity with quantum theory. However, difficulty in merging those…

This thesis is devoted to the first-quantized approach to quantum field theory, commonly known as the 'Worldline Formalism'. It collects most of the works completed by the author during the PhD, illustrating the versatility and efficiency…

John Bell's investigations in foundations of quantum mechanics, particle physics, and quantum field theory are recalled.

The possibility of fundamental theories with very many ground states, each with different physical parameters, changes the way that we approach the major questions of particle physics. Most importantly, it raises the possibility that these…

Experimental tests of the suggestion that the generalization of Wheeler and Feynman's time symmetric system is the dynamical basis underlying quantum mechanics are considered. In a time-symmetric system, the instantaneous correlations…

An oscillating, compact Friedmann universe with a massive conformally coupled scalar field is studied in the framework of quantum cosmology. The scalar field is treated as a perturbation and we look for solutions of the Wheeler-DeWitt…

In these lectures general relativity is outlined as the classical field theory of gravity, emphasizing physical phenomena rather than mathematical formalism. Dynamical solutions representing traveling waves as well as stationary fields like…

Black holes are the elementary particles of gravity, the final state of sufficiently massive stars and of energetic collisions. With a forty-year long history, black hole physics is a fully-blossomed field which promises to embrace several…

Without a doubt many problems in physics arise as a consequence of our philosophical conception of the world. In this contribution however we endeavor to alleviate this scenario by putting forward a philosophical approach under which some…

Strong lensing is a powerful tool to address three major astrophysical issues: understanding the spatial distribution of mass at kpc and sub-kpc scale, where baryons and dark matter interact to shape galaxies as we see them; determining the…

Strong dynamics constitutes one of the pillars of the standard model of particle interactions, and it accounts for the bulk of the visible matter in the universe. It is therefore a well posed question to ask if the rest of the universe can…