相关论文: What happened to modern physics?

The study of many body physics has provided a scientific playground of surprise and continuing revolution over the past half century. The serendipitous discovery of new states and properties of matter, phenomena such as superfluidity, the…

One of the great challenges for 21st century physics is to quantize gravity and generate a theory that will unify gravity with the other three fundamental forces of nature. This paper takes the (heretical) point of view that gravity may be…

Our knowledge about the universe has increased tremendously in the last three decades or so --- thanks to the progress in observations --- but our understanding has improved very little. There are several fundamental questions about our…

Consciousness and quantum mechanics are among the most puzzling phenomena studied in the sciences. Some scholars suggest they are related, though others think this claim commits a "minimization of mystery" fallacy. The aim of this…

After a very brief review of twentieth century elementary particle physics, prospects for the next century are discussed. First and most important are technological limits of opportunities; next, the future experimental program, and finally…

I give a pedagogical explanation of what it is about quantization that makes general relativity go from being a nearly perfect classical theory to a very problematic quantum one. I also explain why some quantization of gravity is…

Quantum mechanics (QM) has attracted a considerable amount of mysticism, in public opinion and even among academic researches, due to some of its conceptually puzzling features, such as the modification of reality by the observer and…

When most people think of physics, they think of what they learned in high school physics: that the world is fundamentally predictable. Given the position and velocity of a particle in space, it should be possible to predict its position at…

The expansion of our universe, when followed backward in time, implies that it emerged from a phase of huge density, the big bang. These stages are so extreme that classical general relativity combined with matter theories is not able to…

One of the greatest achievements of twentieth century physics is the discovery of a very close link between the microcosm and the macrocosm. This follows from the two basic principles of quantum mechanics and relativity, the uncertainty…

Most of the logical objections against the classical laws of motion, as they are usually presented in textbooks, centre on the fact that defining force in terms of mass and acceleration, the first two laws are mere assertions of concepts to…

Physics is so successful today in understanding the nature of matter. What can it say about mind ? Is it possible to have a unified theory of matter and mind within the framework of modern science ? Is Consciousness an accident or is it a…

Metaphysics is the science of being and asks the question ``What really exists?'' The answer to this question has been sought for by mankind since the beginning of recorded time. In the past 2500 years there have been many answers to this…

Richard Feynman famously declared, "I think that I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics." Sean Carroll lamented the persistence of this sentiment in a recent opinion piece entitled, "Even Physicists Don't…

As it is well known, classical mechanics consists of several basic features like determinism, reductionism, completeness of knowledge and mechanicism. In this article the basic assumptions are discussed which underlie those features. It is…

We reconsider some important foundational problems of quantum mechanics. After reviewing the measurement problem and discussing its unavoidability, we analyze some proposals to overcome it. This analysis leads us to reconsider the current…

Prior research has demonstrated how the realist perspectives of classical physics students can translate into specific beliefs about quantum phenomena when taking an introductory modern physics course. Student beliefs regarding the…

At the beginning of the 20th century the classical electron theory (or, perhaps more appropriately, the classical electromagnetic mass theory) - the first physical theory that dared ask the question of what inertia and mass were - was…

At the beginning of the previous century, Newtonian mechanics fell victim to two new revolutionary theories, Quantum Mechanics (QM) and General Relativity (GR). Both theories have transformed our view of physical phenomena, with QM…

The space-time of modern physics is tailored on light. We rigorously construct the basic entities needed by kinematics: geometry of the physical space and time, using as tool electromagnetic waves, and particularly light-rays. After such a…