In 1924, American astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble (1889-1953) established the distance of the “Great Nebula” in Andromeda, clearly placing it outside the limits of our Milky Way. All of a sudden, the observable universe had just expanded by at least a million times. During beautiful evenings of late summer and autumn, you can observe in […]
Read MoreAfter a hundred years, the field of quantum mechanics still has much to cause us to ponder. Nevertheless, science has progressed, and we know more than we used to know. Among the things that have progressed are the modern understandings of past experiments in the context of quantum field theory. Some of the things we […]
Read MoreWhat is the topic of the book? Measurement is one of the most fascinating and misunderstood aspects of quantum physics. It plays no role in classical physics, other than reducing ignorance about the underlying reality. In quantum physics measurement plays a fundamental role, and the choice of what kind of measurement you choose to do […]
Read MoreI had a memorable library day trying to find an answer to a question that is simple to formulate: what is a theoretical value of energy and heat capacity of a classical liquid? I looked through all textbooks dedicated to liquids as well as statistical physics and condensed matter textbooks in the Rayleigh Library at […]
Read MoreMore than a century after Einstein formulated General Relativity (GR), black holes are firmly established as one of its most striking and inescapable consequences.
Read MoreAlbert Einstein developed the theory of relativity using ``thought experiments’’ to illustrate the consequences of a constant speed of light. Many measurements have validated Einstein’s work, but some thought experiments and applications of relativity have only become possible in reality with advances in technology.
Read MoreFour years ago, when I began to write From Crust to Core, A chronicle of deep carbon science, the astrophysicist in me looked forward to documenting the story of how Earth’s carbon originated long ago in stellar explosions. Carbon is the fourth most abundant element in the universe. On Earth it is ranked only fifteenth […]
Read MoreWe only have one universe. On the face of it, the existence of life, complexity, and structure in our universe seems to be lucky or to call out for explanation. When we look more closely, the physical causes of these important phenomena appear to be balanced on a knife-edge. Fine-Tuning in the Physical Universe formulates these questions and explores the answers in the context of many sub-disciplines of physics.
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