Carlos Frenk, Director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University
His offence was to be an ardent advocate of a then controversial idea - that most of the universe’s matter comes as a cold, heavy soup of invisible “dark matter”. Today that is the orthodoxy. [New Scientist]
See also WHERE IS THE MISSING MATTER?
For There We Are Captured—-The Geometry of Spacetime
What does it mean when we say spacetime is “curved” or “flat?”
The answer lies in the interface between differential geometry and physics.
The geometry of spacetime is more complex than we might imagine. The same can be said about quantum geometry.
(via cosmictoquantum)
Niels Bohr (1885 -1962)
(via genqueue)
Martin Rees (born 1942)
“A chimpanzee can’t understand quantum mechanics,” Rees points out.
That might sound like a statement of the obvious. After all, as Richard Feynman famously said, nobody understands quantum mechanics. The point, though, is that chimps don’t even know what they don’t understand. “It’s not that a chimpanzee is struggling to understand quantum mechanics,” Rees says. “It’s not even aware of it.” The question that intrigues Rees is whether there are facets of the universe to which we humans are similarly oblivious.
[Source]
Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, OM, Kt, FRS is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He has been Astronomer Royal since 1995 and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge from 2004 to 2012. Wikipedia
Chaos theory
A mathematical concept that explains that it is possible to get random results from normal equations. The main precept behind this theory is the underlying notion of small occurrences significantly affecting the outcomes of seemingly unrelated events.
Chaos theory has been applied to many different things, from predicting weather patterns to the stock market. Simply put, chaos theory is an attempt to see and understand the underlying order of complex systems that may appear to be without order at first glance.
Perhaps the most famous [Solvay] conference was the October 1927 Fifth Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Photons, where the world’s most notable physicists met to discuss the newly formulated quantum theory. The leading figures were Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Einstein, disenchanted with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, remarked “God does not play dice”. Bohr replied, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do”. (See Bohr–Einstein debates.) 17 of the 29 attendees were or became Nobel Prize winners, including Marie Curie, who alone among them, had won Nobel Prizes in two separate scientific disciplines.This conference was also the culmination of the struggle between Einstein and the scientific realists, who wanted strict rules of scientific method as laid out by Charles Peirce and Karl Popper, versus Bohr and the instrumentalists, who wanted looser rules based on outcomes. Starting at this point, the instrumentalists won, instrumentalism having been seen as the norm ever since, although the debate has been actively continued by the likes of Alan Musgrave.
Twenty-nine physicists, the main quantum theorists of the day, came together to discuss the topic “Electrons and Photons”. Seventeen of the 29 attendees were or would become Nobel Prize winners.
Among the most famous participants in the conference were Erwin Schrodinger, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Auguste Piccard, Paul Dirac, Max Born, Wolfgang Pauli, Louis de Broglie, Marie Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Hans Kramers, and Albert Einstein.
These men - particularly Bohr, Heisenberg, Kramers, Dirac and Born together with de Broglie - represent the founding fathers of quantum mechanics.
The film opens with quick shots of Erwin Schrodinger and Niels Bohr. Auguste Piccard of the University of Brussels follows and then the camera re-focuses on Schrodinger and Bohr.
Following the newsreel is a “home movie” shot by Irving Langmuir, (the 1932 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry). It captures 2 minutes of an intermission in the proceedings. Twenty-one of the 29 attendees are on the film.
