Representing Theoretical Physics Research in and on Ceramics

Leonardo ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Nadav Drukker

A theoretical physicist and potter, the author presents his practice which fuses these two sides of him in one. His art aims to circumvent the regular pitfalls of scientific public-engagement, replacing a didactic approach with sensory stimuli from tactile objects, eliciting curiosity for science. The author presents the origins of his practice and focuses on several series of ceramic pots. He explains the design of their form and decoration, exemplifying the interconnections between physics, mathematics and some of his artistic influences. The paper concludes with a discussion of his experience presenting the work and its reception.

Author(s):  
Paolo Perinotti

The personal viewpoint of a theoretical physicist about the relation between reality and physical science is exposed, starting from his personal experience in the context of quantum foundations and quantum information theory. The effectiveness of an axiomatic approach is argued as a navigation system between the abstract landscape of quantum theory and the reality of facts, along a road that is intrinsically unaccessible to classical conceptual maps. The present approach requires physics to accept the notion of information at its deepest level, in place of matter and space-time, that are recovered only as an effective description of phenomena on a secondary level. As a result of the above operation, a simplified conceptual scenario is achieved, where new possibilities are available for facing the open challenges of theoretical physics.


2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (09) ◽  
pp. 1741015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmed Ali

The charge given to me by the organisers of the memorial meeting for Prof. Abdus Salam’s 90th birthday is to recall my personal impressions of him and review an aspect of the standard model (SM) physics related to my work. Salam was, first and foremost, a brilliant theoretical physicist whose work is still very much en vogue, currently being tested precisely by the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Salam was, however, equally effective as a scientific advisor to many institutions, such as IAEA and CERN, but also to the government of Pakistan as the chief scientific strategist. He was also an untiring advocate of scientific research and higher education in developing countries, which took a concrete form in the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste. I discuss these aspects of his scientific life seen from my perspective in the first part. In the second part of my talk, which may appear as a disjoint piece to the first, I summarise some selected topics in rare B-decays — the current flavour physics frontier. Experiments carried out over several decades are largely in agreement with the SM, thanks also to dedicated theoretical effort in their interpretation. However, this field is undergoing an anomalous phase in a number of key measurements, in particular reported by LHCb, triggering a very lively debate and model building. These anomalies, which I review here, are too numerous to be ignored, but none is individually significant enough to announce a breakdown of the SM.


2020 ◽  
Vol 69 ◽  
pp. 467-498
Author(s):  
Edward Corrigan ◽  
Peter Goddard

David Olive, who died in Barton, Cambridgeshire, on 7 November 2012, aged 75, was a theoretical physicist who made seminal contributions to the development of string theory and to our understanding of the structure of quantum field theory. In early work on S -matrix theory, he helped to provide the conceptual framework within which string theory was initially formulated. His work, with Gliozzi and Scherk, on supersymmetry in string theory made possible the whole idea of superstrings, now understood as the natural framework for string theory. Olive’s pioneering insights about the duality between electric and magnetic objects in gauge theories were way ahead of their time; it took two decades before his bold and courageous duality conjectures began to be understood. Although somewhat quiet and reserved, he took delight in the company of others, generously sharing his emerging understanding of new ideas with students and colleagues. He was widely influential, not only through the depth and vision of his original work, but also because the clarity, simplicity and elegance of his expositions of new and difficult ideas and theories provided routes into emerging areas of research, both for students and for the theoretical physics community more generally.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 213-254
Author(s):  
Magdalena Gronau ◽  
Martin Gronau

AbstractThe present article focuses on the theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner Erwin Schrödinger (1887−1961) and his early attempts to popularize physics in the twenties and early thirties. Special attention is drawn to the ›entanglement‹ of media prerequisites and the subject Schrödinger deals with. Exemplary analysis of the magazines in which Schrödinger published, illustrations, and Schrödinger’s rather journalistic, zeitgeisty style of writing reveals a specific way of imparting the small world of atomic physics, hidden to the eye, to a broader audience. While the majority of contemporary quantum theorists rejected the allegedly old-fashioned physics of pictures and models, Schrödinger’s popular scientific praxis of a vivid explanation is even reflected in his epistemological position regarding the central goal of theoretical physics - namely, producing clear and illustrative models.


Author(s):  
Giuseppe Mussardo

This book is an introduction to statistical field theory, which is an important subject within theoretical physics and a field that has seen substantial progress in recent years. The book covers fundamental topics in great detail and includes areas like conformal field theory, quantum integrability, S-matrices, braiding groups, Bethe ansatz, renormalization groups, Majorana fermions, form factors, the truncated conformal space approach and boundary field theory. It also provides an introduction to lattice statistical models. Many topics are discussed at a fairly advanced level but via a pedagogical approach. In particular, the book presents in a clear way non-perturbative methods of quantum field theories that have become decisive tools in many different areas of statistical and condensed matter physics, and which are currently an essential foundation of the working knowledge of a modern theoretical physicist.


2006 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 479-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Berry ◽  
John F. Nye

John Ziman was a theoretical physicist whose work was characterized by its clarity and simplicity and was always firmly grounded in experimental reality. He developed and refined the application of quantum mechanics to the transport properties of crystalline solids, and pioneered the quantum theory of disordered solids and liquid metals. He served as Head of the Physics Department at Bristol University, and created the theoretical physics group there. In many influential books and articles he broke fresh ground in his studies of science as a collective human enterprise.


Professor A.I. Akhiezer is an outstanding Soviet theoretical physicist who made an outstanding contribution to the development of science. He is one of the most active in the field of theoretical physics of Soviet scientists. He has done about a hundred papers on various problems of nuclear physics, quantum electrodynamics, and the theory of charged particle accelerators. A number of difficult and ingenious studies, which gave fundamental results, made a significant contribution to the development of these problems and made his name known and authoritative among scientists of the Soviet Union and abroad. Professor A.I. Akhiezer is one of the best Soviet theoretical physicists working in the field of atomic nucleus physics and quantum electrodynamics. He is the author of first-class works on the scattering of γ-quanta by nuclei, on the diffraction scattering of nuclear particles. He established the possibility of a new phenomenon — diffraction splitting of deuterons by nuclei. AI Akhiezer is the author of the pioneering work on the scattering of neutrons in crystals, which have become particularly important in connection with the question of the moderation of neutrons. Of great importance was his first work to determine the critical dimensions of the reactor, taking into account the slowing down of neutrons. Of particular note are the works of Professor A.I. Akhiezer and his school on the theory of linear accelerators of charged particles and the theory of plasma.


Author(s):  
Oleksandr S. Bakai ◽  
◽  
Yurii V. Slyusarenko ◽  
Nikolay F. Shul’ga ◽  
◽  
...  

February 14 marks the 90th anniversary of the outstanding Ukrainian theoretical physicist in the field of statistical physics, quantum liquid and crystal physics, plasma physics, magnetic phenomena, quantum field theory, whose work is recognized by the world scientific community, twice winner of the State Prize of Ukraine in Science and Technology (1986, 1996), Honored Worker of Science and Technology of Ukraine (1998), winner of the nominal prizes of the NAS of Ukraine named after K.D. Synelnykov (1978), M.M. Krylov (1986), M.M. Bogolyubov (2002), O.I. Akhiezer (2018), Chief Researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the National Science Center Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics (1966), Professor (1969), Academician of the NAS of Ukraine (1990) Sergey V. Peletminskii.


2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 176 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. A. Robson

Kenneth James Le Couteur was born in St Helier, Jersey, on 16 September 1920 and died in Canberra on 18 April 2011. He had a distinguished career as a theoretical physicist in the United Kingdom and in Australia as the Foundation Professor of Theoretical Physics in the Research School of Physical Sciences of the Australian National University. He was internationally recognized for his significant contributions to the statistical model of excited nuclei and the extraction of beams from proton synchrocyclotron accelerators.


Author(s):  
M. J. Duff ◽  
K. S. Stelle

Professor Tom Kibble was an internationally-renowned theoretical physicist whose contributions to theoretical physics range from the theory of elementary particles to modern early-Universe cosmology. The unifying theme behind all his work is the theory of non-abelian gauge theories, the Yang–Mills extension of electromagnetism. One of Kibble's most important pieces of work in this area was his study of the symmetry-breaking mechanism whereby the force-carrying vector particles in the theory can acquire a mass accompanied by the appearance of a massive scalar boson. This idea, put forward independently by Brout and Englert, by Higgs, and by Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble in 1964, and generalized by Kibble in 1967, lies at the heart of the Standard Model and all modern unified theories of fundamental particles. It was vindicated in 2012 by the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN. According to Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg: ‘Tom Kibble showed us why light is massless’; this is the fundamental basis of electromagnetism.


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