相关论文: Fermi and Szilard
The Varenna school is a hub where generations of physicists, including numerous Nobel laureates, have shaped the field, often through collaborative exchanges across political and cultural boundaries. We examine the scientific legacy of…
Expository paper providing a historical survey of the gradual transformation of the "philosophical discussions" between Bohr, Einstein and Schr\"odinger on foundational issues in quantum mechanics into a quantitative prediction of a new…
We retrace the first steps towards understanding neutrinos, particles predicted by Pauli in 1930 to avoid a supposed violation of time-translation symmetry. Despite the tendency to reduce the whole story to his intuition and the skill of…
The conceptual bases of Fermi's $\beta$-ray theory (at its 90th anniversary) are examined, highlighting the innovative drive and inspirational role for the progress that followed just afterwards. Moreover, the three different ideas of the…
One of the primary goals of nuclear physics is to understand the force between nucleons, which is a necessary step for understanding the structure of nuclei and how nuclei interact with each other. Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus…
My personal encounter with Weinberg's proposal of 1990 was a really entertaining one: My collaborator David Entem and I had embarked to show that Weinberg's idea, though smart and beautiful, was essentially useless in practice (like so many…
In conventional nuclear experiments a beam of accelerated nuclei collides with a target nucleus that is surrounded by other nuclei in a molecule, in condensed matter, or in a plasma environment. It is shown that for low collision energies…
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…
The Manhattan Project was one of the largest scientific collaborations ever undertaken. It operated thanks to a complex social network of extraordinary minds and it became undoubtedly one of the most remarkable intellectual efforts of human…
One of the most public episodes of gatekeeping in modern science was the case of so-called 'cold fusion'. At a news conference in 1989 the electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced that they had found evidence of nuclear…
We give an account of the appearance and first developments of the statistical model of atoms proposed by Thomas and Fermi, focusing on the main results achieved by Fermi and his group in Rome. Particular attention is addressed to the…
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…
Probably the most dramatic historical challenge to scientific realism concerns Arnold Sommerfeld's 1916 derivation of the fine structure energy levels of hydrogen. Not only were his predictions good, he derived exactly the same formula that…
Effective field theories are recognized nowadays as the framework to describe low-energy nuclear structure and reactions consistently with the underlying theory of the strong interactions, QCD. It was not always so. As we celebrate the 30…
An ab-initio description of atomic nuclei that solves the nuclear many-body problem for realistic nuclear forces is expected to possess a high degree of predictive power. In this contribution we treat the main obstacle, namely the…
Chiral symmetry, first entering in nuclear physics in the 1970's for which Gerry Brown played a seminal role, has led to a stunningly successful framework for describing strongly-correlated nuclear dynamics both in finite and infinite…
Ninety years ago in 1927, at an international congress in Como, Italy, Niels Bohr gave an address which is recognized as the first instance in which the term "complementarity", as a physical concept, was spoken publicly [1], revealing…
Enrico Fermi was one of the greater physicists of the XX century. In 1934, he gave several lectures in Brazil. Invited by Theodoro Ramos to work in S\~ao Paulo, he preferred to stay in Rome and went to the USA in 1938. However, Fermi…
Another partial solution of Fermi's famous paradox is proposed, based on our increased understanding of geophysics, geo-engineering and climatology. It has been claimed in the recent astrobiological literature (for instance, in the recent…
Violent nuclear collisions are open systems which require a non-equilibrium description when the process should be followed from the first instants. The heated system produced in the collision, can no more be treated within an…