Photos and Stories, Show and Tell

• 100 years of continous history since Bohr and Einstein.

• While he was in Copenhagen, what did he discuss with Bohr? Einstein did not want to talk about the Copenhagen interpretation of the uncertainty principle.
  1. Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Why was he against it?

  2. Einstein needs Quantum Mechanics.
  3. Standing Waves in the Lorentz -covariant World.
  4. Einstein's Philosphy of Physics, based on Kant, Tao, and Hegel.
  5. Einstein's Bern, the Birthplace of E = mc² .

• Further contents of E = mc².

• Click here for more about Einstein.

Koenigsberg (now Kaliningrad) was the craddle of modern physics. Have you been there? Best way to do physics:

• Michael Fowler on Modern Physics.

• Lev Okun talks about Fundamental Units.

• Norma Sanchez about Unification of Concepts.

• Kaliningrad. Immanuel Kant was born in Koenigsberg, and lived there for 80 years. Kant was Einstein's philosopher.

• Hegelian approach to Physics.

• Sommerfeld and Fermi.

• Victor Hugo had two mothers.

• The house of Huygens in Rotterdam.

• Jean-Paul Sartre for physicists.

• Herod Complex. Psychological problem for every physicist.

  
  

• Maxwell and Lorentz covariance.
  1. Minkowski, Maxwell's equations, Minkowski space, and his Lithuanian background.
  2. Maxwell and Wigner. Massive and massless particles.
  3. Maxwell's Edinburgh. Maxwell was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland. Who else came from Edinburgh?
  4. Maxwell Waves from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Algebra. What is needed to bridge them?
  5. Maxwell, Marconi, and Sarnoff. How did they create this world of electronics?

• Faraday and Disraeli. Faraday got money from Disraeli for his research. How?

  
  

• Feynman: the Elvis Presley of Science, by Yuval Ne'eman.
  1. Richard Feynman as a Kantianist.

  2. Feynman's 1970 Talk Harmonic Oscillators and Hadronic Mass Spectra.
  3. Feynman's Parton Picture.
  4. Feynman and Regge Poles.
  5. Feynman-Gell-Mann Gap and Feynman-Dirac Gap. Can they be bridged?
  6. 50 Years of the Quark Model.
  7. Feynman's Current Agenda.
  8. Feynman's One Physics.

  9. Feynman and Hegel. Then need each other.

  10. Feynman as an Artist.
  11. Feynman Photos.

  12. Feynman's Rio de Janeiro.
  13. Feynman's Father came from Minsk.
  
  

Heisenbeg and Bohr

• Bohr and Kierkgaard. Bohr's philosophical background.
  1. Was Einstein totally against Copenhagen? If so, why did he meet Bohr often after 1927?
  2. Bohr and Einstein. Did they talk about moving hydrogen atoms and their electron orbits?
  3. Bohr's hydrogen atom. 100 years from 1913 to 2013.
  4. Evolution of the hydrogen atom. The evolution of the way we look at the hydrogen atom and quantum bound states.
  5. Bohr's grandson talks about him. Niels Bohr was an oriental philosopher.

• Heisenberg talks about Einstein, including his visit to Einstein's house in 1954.
  1. Heisenberg and Wigner, then Maxwell and Einstein.
  2. Heisenberg and Dirac. Is it possible to construct the Lorentz group from Heisenberg's uncertainty relations?

• Paul A. M. Dirac.
  1. I met Dirac in 1962.
  2. Lorentz Covariance.
  3. Wigner's brother-in-law.
  4. Lorentz and Dirac on Lorentz transformations.
  5. Dirac and Heisenberg.
  6. Dirac's polarized neutrinos.
  7. Dirac's Squeezed States.
  8. Wigner's Sisters. Dirac's wife was Wigner's sister.
  9. Dirac and Feynman. Combine them to get a stronger result.

  10. Chaucer, Dirac, and Feynman on permutations.
  11. Bankers, physicists, and their space-time approaches.
  12. Dirac's Cambridge.
  13. Bridges in Physics. How to build them? With mathematics? Not enough.
  
  

• I met Eugene Wigner while I was a graduate student at Princeton University (1958 - 1961), but he was not a thesis advisor. My advisor was Sam Treiman. Yet, I was interested in Wigner's 1939 paper on representations of the Poincaré group.

  Click here for a story.

  It is generally agreed that Wigner deserved the Nobel Prize for this paper, but he got the prize in 1963 for other reasons. I investigated this problem and showed that he indeed deserved the prize for this paper, and explained why this paper was not fully appreciated in 1963 when the Nobel citation was written.

• Click here for further details, and see this table. Click here for an Arxived article on this subject.

  Einstein's World Massive/Slow between Massless/Fast

  Energy Momentum E=p2/2m Einstein's E=(m2 + p2)1/2 E = cp

  Spin, Gauge, Helicity S3 S1 S2 Wigner's Little Group S3 Gauge Trans.

  Hadrons, Bound States Gell-Mann's Quark Model One Lorentz-Covariant Entity Feynman's Parton Picture

  This table is from my PRL paper published in 1989. Since I made a contribution to the 3rd row of the above table, I am known as Wigner's student in the physics community.

  
  

• Schrödinger's Vienna.
• Schrödinger and Einstein.

• Boltzmann and Entropy.

• Maxwell and Minkowki. Lorentz covariance of Maxwell's equations.
• Maxwell and Wigner. Lorentz completion of Maxwell's equations.
• Yukawa and Feynman.
• Lev Landau (1908-1968).
• Bohr and Kierkegaard. Faith in Physics.

• Lasting effect of Chew's Bootstrapism.
• Dashen-Frautschi fiasco.
• Quark Model and God's number.

• Hermann Weyl's Sympectic Group. Two-by-two matrices.
• Lorentz and Unification of Forces.
• John A. Wheeler as a Cartoonist.

• Power of Two-by-two Matrices.
• Conic sections.
• Harmonic Oscillators as bridges between theories.

• Charles Hermite. Hermitian operators, Hermitian matrices, and Hermite polynomials. Can you do physics without him?
• Henri Poincaré's Ding-an-Sich.
  

• Copernicus and Islamic Astronomy.
  1. Copernicus and Galileo.
  2. Copernicus's Poland.

• Galileo's Italy.
  1. Galileo's Padua.
  2. Galileo's Inclined Plane, and its Synchronous Bells. Implications in Quantum Mechanics!
  3. T. D. Lee's Galileo in Rome. T. D. Lee shared the 1957 Nobel prize in physics with C. N. Yang on their work on parity violation. TD was 30 years old then. Did you know that he is also an artist?

• Four giants from Pittburgh, namely George Washington, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, and George Westinghouse.

• Thomas Edison as more than a physicist.
• Tesla and Westinghouse. How did they change the world?
• Edison and Tesla. We need both AC and DC.

• Maxwell, Marconi, and Sarnoff. How did they create this world of electronics?
• Lee de Forest invented the vacuum tube.
• Popov and Edison. Russian Navy, and Annapolis.
• Michael Pupin's Columbia. Also Hermann Helmholtz and Edwin Howard Armstrong.

• Computer Chronology.
• Digital literature. New language for communication.

  
  

From shortwaves to internet.

• Harmony in Architecture and Harmony in Physics.
• China for Physicists.
• Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle.
• Physics and Music.
• Florence, the headquarters of the Renaissance.

• Kazan is a city of harmony.
• Saint Petersburg. Interesting photos, and interesting physics.
• Sergei Eisenstein and Physics.
• Wright Brothers. How much federal grants did they receive for their research?

• Photos from Edinburgh. James Clerk Maxwell, Adam Smith, David Fume, and many other people came from this city.

• Eton and Harrow. The concept of Eton-Harrow is totally outdated, but people still talk about them. This is one of the most popular pages in my website.

• Wigner's high school in Budapest produced two Nobels, as well as John von Neumann.

• How to construct webpages?

Why is he with Einstein?

This webpage is maintained by Y. S. Kim. The 1959 photo of Feynman and Gell-Mann is licensed from the Caltech Photo Archives.

• Click here for Y. S. Kim's home page.

• Einstein page.

• Style page.

• Travel around the world.