The Summer of 1954 and Paths to the Institut Laue-Langevin
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The Pursuit of Quantum Gravity
The Pursuit of Quantum Gravity Cécile DeWitt-Morette The Pursuit of Quantum Gravity Memoirs of Bryce DeWitt from 1946 to 2004 123 Cécile DeWitt-Morette Department of Physics Center for Relativity University of Texas at Austin Austin Texas USA [email protected] ISBN 978-3-642-14269-7 e-ISBN 978-3-642-14270-3 DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-14270-3 Springer Heidelberg Dordrecht London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2011921724 c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is con- cerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilm or in any other way, and storage in data banks. Duplication of this publica- tion or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the German Copyright Law of September 9, 1965, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Violations are liable to prosecution under the German Copyright Law. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protec- tive laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. Cover design:WMXDesignGmbH,Heidelberg Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Dedicated to our daughters, Nicolette, Jan, Christiane, Abigail Preface This book is written for the curious reader. I hope it will also be a good read for the professional physicist. -
Simulating Physics with Computers
International Journal of Theoretical Physics, VoL 21, Nos. 6/7, 1982 Simulating Physics with Computers Richard P. Feynman Department of Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91107 Received May 7, 1981 1. INTRODUCTION On the program it says this is a keynote speech--and I don't know what a keynote speech is. I do not intend in any way to suggest what should be in this meeting as a keynote of the subjects or anything like that. I have my own things to say and to talk about and there's no implication that anybody needs to talk about the same thing or anything like it. So what I want to talk about is what Mike Dertouzos suggested that nobody would talk about. I want to talk about the problem of simulating physics with computers and I mean that in a specific way which I am going to explain. The reason for doing this is something that I learned about from Ed Fredkin, and my entire interest in the subject has been inspired by him. It has to do with learning something about the possibilities of computers, and also something about possibilities in physics. If we suppose that we know all the physical laws perfectly, of course we don't have to pay any attention to computers. It's interesting anyway to entertain oneself with the idea that we've got something to learn about physical laws; and if I take a relaxed view here (after all I'm here and not at home) I'll admit that we don't understand everything. -
Download Report 2010-12
RESEARCH REPORt 2010—2012 MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Cover: Aurora borealis paintings by William Crowder, National Geographic (1947). The International Geophysical Year (1957–8) transformed research on the aurora, one of nature’s most elusive and intensely beautiful phenomena. Aurorae became the center of interest for the big science of powerful rockets, complex satellites and large group efforts to understand the magnetic and charged particle environment of the earth. The auroral visoplot displayed here provided guidance for recording observations in a standardized form, translating the sublime aesthetics of pictorial depictions of aurorae into the mechanical aesthetics of numbers and symbols. Most of the portait photographs were taken by Skúli Sigurdsson RESEARCH REPORT 2010—2012 MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Introduction The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) is made up of three Departments, each administered by a Director, and several Independent Research Groups, each led for five years by an outstanding junior scholar. Since its foundation in 1994 the MPIWG has investigated fundamental questions of the history of knowl- edge from the Neolithic to the present. The focus has been on the history of the natu- ral sciences, but recent projects have also integrated the history of technology and the history of the human sciences into a more panoramic view of the history of knowl- edge. Of central interest is the emergence of basic categories of scientific thinking and practice as well as their transformation over time: examples include experiment, ob- servation, normalcy, space, evidence, biodiversity or force. -
Personal Recollections of the Early Days Before and After the Birth of Supergravity
Personal recollections of the early days before and after the birth of Supergravity Peter van Nieuwenhuizen I March 29, 1976: Dan Freedman, Sergio Ferrara and I submit first paper on Supergravity to Physical Review D. I April 28: Stanley Deser and Bruno Zumino: elegant reformulation that stresses the role of torsion. I June 2, 2016 at 1:30pm: 5500 papers with Supergravity in the title have appeared, and 15000 dealing with supergravity. I Supergravity has I led to the AdS/CFT miracle, and I made breakthroughs in longstanding problems in mathematics. I Final role of supergravity? (is it a solution in search of a problem?) I 336 papers in supergravity with 126 collaborators I Now: many directions I can only observe in awe from the sidelines I will therefore tell you my early recollections and some anecdotes. I will end with a new research program that I am enthusiastic about. In 1972 I was a Joliot Curie fellow at Orsay (now the Ecole Normale) in Paris. Another postdoc (Andrew Rothery from England) showed me a little book on GR by Lawden.1 I was hooked. That year Deser gave lectures at Orsay on GR, and I went with him to Brandeis. In 1973, 't Hooft and Veltman applied their new covariant quantization methods and dimensional regularization to pure gravity, using the 't Hooft lemma (Gilkey) for 1-loop divergences and the background field formalism of Bryce DeWitt. They found that at one loop, pure gravity was finite: 1 2 2 ∆L ≈ αRµν + βR = 0 on-shell. But what about matter couplings? 1\An Introduction to Tensor Calculus and Relativity". -
Adobe Acrobat PDF Document
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH of HUGH EVERETT, III. Eugene Shikhovtsev ul. Dzerjinskogo 11-16, Kostroma, 156005, Russia [email protected] ©2003 Eugene B. Shikhovtsev and Kenneth W. Ford. All rights reserved. Sources used for this biographical sketch include papers of Hugh Everett, III stored in the Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics; Graduate Alumni Files in Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University; personal correspondence of the author; and information found on the Internet. The author is deeply indebted to Kenneth Ford for great assistance in polishing (often rewriting!) the English and for valuable editorial remarks and additions. If you want to get an interesting perspective do not think of Hugh as a traditional 20th century physicist but more of a Renaissance man with interests and skills in many different areas. He was smart and lots of things interested him and he brought the same general conceptual methodology to solve them. The subject matter was not so important as the solution ideas. Donald Reisler [1] Someone once noted that Hugh Everett should have been declared a “national resource,” and given all the time and resources he needed to develop new theories. Joseph George Caldwell [1a] This material may be freely used for personal or educational purposes provided acknowledgement is given to Eugene B. Shikhovtsev, author ([email protected]), and Kenneth W. Ford, editor ([email protected]). To request permission for other uses, contact the author or editor. CONTENTS 1 Family and Childhood Einstein letter (1943) Catholic University of America in Washington (1950-1953). Chemical engineering. Princeton University (1953-1956). -
Conceptual Issues in Quantum Cosmology
Conceptual Issues in Quantum Cosmology Claus Kiefer Institut fur¨ Theoretische Physik Universitat¨ zu Koln¨ ½ Contents Why quantum cosmology? Boundary conditions Decoherence in quantum cosmology Direction of time Why Quantum Cosmology? Gell-Mann and Hartle 1990: Quantum mechanics is best and most fundamentally understood in the framework of quantum cosmology. I Quantum theory is universally valid: Application to the Universe as a whole as the only closed quantum system in the strict sense I Need quantum theory of gravity, since gravity dominates on large scales Georges Lemaˆıtre 1931: If the world has begun with a single quantum, the notions of space and time would altogether fail to have any meaning at the beginning . If this suggestion is correct, the beginning of the world happened a little before the beginning of space and time. Main approaches to quantum gravity No question about quantum gravity is more difficult than the question, “What is the question?” (John Wheeler 1984) I Quantum general relativity I Covariant approaches (perturbation theory, path integrals including spin foams, asymptotic safety, . ) I Canonical approaches (geometrodynamics, connection dynamics, loop dynamics, . ) I String theory I Fundamental discrete approaches (quantum topology, causal sets, group field theory, . ); have partially grown out of the other approaches See e.g. C. Kiefer, Quantum Gravity, 3rd edition, Oxford 2012. Quantum geometrodynamics (a) John Archibald Wheeler (b) Bryce DeWitt Application of Schrodinger’s¨ procedure to general relativity leads -
{Download PDF} Feynman
FEYNMAN PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Jim Ottaviani | 272 pages | 13 May 2013 | Roaring Brook Press | 9781596438279 | English | New Milford, United States The Feynman Technique: A Beginner's Guide to Learning Fast While complex, subject-specific jargon sounds cool, it confuses people and urges them to stop paying attention. Replace technical terms with simpler words, and think of how you could explain your lesson to a child. Children are not able to understand jargon or dense vocabulary. His charts were able to simply explain things that other scientists took hours to lecture students on in an attempt to teach them. If a concept is highly technical or complicated, analogies are also a good way to simplify them. Analogies are the foundation of learning from experience, and they work because they make use of your brain's natural inclination to match patterns. Analogies influence what you perceive and remember, and help you process information more easily because you associate it with things you already know. These mental shortcuts are useful methods of processing new and unfamiliar information and help people understand, organize, and comprehend incoming information. One example of an analogy created by Feynman encapsulates the power of his technique. He was able to take a question regarding human existence and simplify it into a simple sentence that even a middle-schooler could understand. Feynman said:. Here, Feynman is saying that if you don't know anything about physics, the most important concept to understand is that everything is composed of atoms. In one sentence, he communicates the fundamental existence of the universe. -
The History and Impact of the CNO Cycles in Nuclear Astrophysics
Phys. Perspect. 20 (2018) 124–158 Ó 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 1422-6944/18/010124-35 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-018-0216-0 Physics in Perspective The History and Impact of the CNO Cycles in Nuclear Astrophysics Michael Wiescher* The carbon cycle, or Bethe-Weizsa¨cker cycle, plays an important role in astrophysics as one of the most important energy sources for quiescent and explosive hydrogen burning in stars. This paper presents the intellectual and historical background of the idea of the correlation between stellar energy production and the synthesis of the chemical elements in stars on the example of this cycle. In particular, it addresses the contributions of Carl Friedrich von Weizsa¨cker and Hans Bethe, who provided the first predictions of the carbon cycle. Further, the experimental verification of the predicted process as it developed over the following decades is discussed, as well as the extension of the initial carbon cycle to the carbon- nitrogen-oxygen (CNO) multi-cycles and the hot CNO cycles. This development emerged from the detailed experimental studies of the associated nuclear reactions over more than seven decades. Finally, the impact of the experimental and theoretical results on our present understanding of hydrogen burning in different stellar environments is presented, as well as the impact on our understanding of the chemical evolution of our universe. Key words: Carl Friedrich von Weizsa¨cker; Hans Bethe; Carbon cycle; CNO cycle. Introduction The energy source of the sun and all other stars became a topic of great interests in the physics community in the second half of the nineteenth century. -
Research on Quantum Physics Important Principles and Photoelectric Effect
ISSN(Online): 2319-8753 ISSN (Print): 2347-6710 International Journal of Innovative Research in Science, Engineering and Technology (A High Impact Factor, Monthly, Peer Reviewed Journal) Visit: www.ijirset.com Vol. 6, Issue 12, December 2017 Research on Quantum Physics Important Principles and Photoelectric Effect Dr. Purnima Shrivastava Department of Physics, Rani Durgavati Vishwavidyalaya, Jabalpur M.P, India ABSTRACT: Quantum mechanics (QM; also known as quantum physics or quantum theory), including quantum field theory, is a fundamental theory in physics which describes nature at the smallest scales of energy levels of atoms and subatomic particles. Classical physics (the physics existing before quantum mechanics) is a set of fundamental theories which describes nature at ordinary (macroscopic) scale. Most theories in classical physics can be derived from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid at large (macroscopic) scale.[3] Quantum mechanics differs from classical physics in that: energy, momentum and other quantities of a system may be restricted to discrete values (quantization), objects have characteristics of both particles and waves (wave-particle duality), and there are limits to the precision with which quantities can be known (uncertainty principle). I. INTRODUCTION Physics is a means to describe the world around us. It makes use of facts, theories and experiments in order to determine certain physical quantities. Physicists are always looking for knowledge, trying to understand everything. One of the basic physical ideas is that everything can be known. To know everything might be difficult. It might even be practically impossible, but theoretically it must be possible. This is the main goal of physics: to know everything. -
BRYCE SELIGMAN DEWITT January 8, 1923–September 23, 2004
NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES B R Y C E S E L I G M A N D EWITT 1 9 2 3 — 2 0 0 4 A Biographical Memoir by S T E V E N W EIN B ERG Any opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Academy of Sciences. Biographical Memoir COPYRIGHT 2008 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES WASHINGTON, D.C. Larry Murphy BRYCE SELIGMAN DEWITT January 8, 1923–September 23, 2004 BY STEVEN WEIN BERG RYCE SELIGMAN DEWITT, PROFESSOR EMERITUS IN THE physics Bdepartment of the University of Texas at Austin, died on September 23, 2004. His career was marked by major contributions to classical and quantum field theories, in particular, to the theory of gravitation. DeWitt was born Carl Bryce Seligman on January 8, 1923, in Dinuba, California, the eldest of four boys. His paternal grandfather, Emil Seligman, left Germany around 1875 at the age of 17 and emigrated to California, where he and his brother established a general store in Traver. Emil mar- ried Anna Frey, a young woman who had emigrated from Switzerland at about the same time. They had 11 children, whom Anna raised in the Methodist church. In 1921 DeWitt’s father, who had become a country doctor, married the local high school teacher of Latin and mathematics. Her ancestors were French Huguenots and Scottish Presbyterians. DeWitt was raised in the Presbyterian Church, and the only Jewish elements in his early life were the matzos that his grandfather bought around the time of Passover. -
Highways and Byways of Quantum Cosmology in Ancient Days
Highways and Byways of Quantum Cosmology in Ancient Days 1968-~1974 ~ 45 yrs. ago • When did quantum cosmology begin? • Bryce DeWitt 1967 • Quantization of an FRW model • A toy model of quantum gravity Misner group 1968- ~1974 • Why study quantum cosmology? • Again, a toy model of quantum gravity to study solutions to technical problems in canonical quantum gravity • e.g. time choice • No physics necessarily (but very seductive) • Later, quantum cosmology as physics became popular • Does quantum cosmology really have anything to do with physics? • Question: Does the following diagram commute? • Answer: Maybe • Toy model test: Cosmologies of higher symmetry imbedded in those of less symmetry (microsuperspace in minisuperspace) • Result: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. • Deciding factor: ~ near track of cosm. in superspace (i.e. perturbations to second order) Byways: Forgotten or unknown highways I) Exponential parametrization Very old attempt to maintain (to avoid “singularities”) Doesn’t always work, e.g. logarithmic solns. for exponents in Schwarzschild. Bianchi Cosmologies • Misner parametrization: Bianchi I: • Momenta conjugate to Hamiltonian constraint H = Hamiltonian constraint, H = (?) Of course, this is a simple change of variables. What about quantization? Consider the hydrogen atom (s-states, ): Classically , so try exponential parametrization, and Quantization: • Time-independent Schrödinger eqn. 1) “Misner” factor ordering: Taking Wrong! (by experiment) 2) “DeWitt” factor ordering: Laplace-Beltrami operator with Right answer Side remark: 3) “Hawking” factor ordering arbitrary constant Wrong for (In QC the “Hawking” factor ordering leads to interesting exact solutions for Bianchi IX) Hydrogen atom: this change of variables is OK up to factor ordering. In QC, lacking experiment, take your choice. -
Feynman Ebook Free Download
FEYNMAN PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Jim Ottaviani | 272 pages | 13 May 2013 | Roaring Brook Press | 9781596438279 | English | New Milford, United States Feynman PDF Book Los Angeles Magazine. Her brother died in at Not exactly. As a child, he had a talent for engineering, maintained an experimental laboratory in his home, and delighted in repairing radios. For free fields with a quadratic action, the probability distribution is a high-dimensional Gaussian, and the statistical average is given by an explicit formula. The particles are represented by the lines of the diagram, which can be squiggly or straight, with an arrow or without, depending on the type of particle. Instead, he used verbal communication as the foundation for the majority of his published works. Real Time Opera. So I manufacture a quarter-size lathe; I manufacture quarter-size tools; and I make, at the one-quarter scale, still another set of hands again relatively one-quarter size! The immense brightness of the explosion made him duck to the truck's floor, where he saw a temporary "purple splotch" afterimage. An interlocutory decree of divorce was entered on June 19, , on the grounds of "extreme cruelty". Wilson , who was working on means to produce enriched uranium for use in an atomic bomb , as part of what would become the Manhattan Project. In the Abelian case, the determinant for covariant gauges does not depend on A , so the ghosts do not contribute to the connected diagrams. Feynman seemed to possess a frightening ease with the substance behind the equations, like Einstein at the same age, like the Soviet physicist Lev Landau —but few others.