The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013
François Englert, Peter Higgs

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013

Photo: Pnicolet via Wikimedia Commons

François Englert

Photo: G-M Greuel via Wikimedia Commons

Peter W. Higgs

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider"

Entrico Fermi

There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.
Enrico Fermi
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There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.
Enrico Fermi
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           There are two possible outcomes: If the results confirm's the hypothesis, then you've made a measurements. If the results is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery - Entrico Fermi.

             Fermi's first major contribution was to statistical mechanics. After Wolfgang Pauli announced his exclusion principle in 1925, Fermi followed with a paper in which he applied the principle to an ideal gas, employing a statistical formulation now known as Fermi–Dirac statistics. Today, particles that obey the exclusion principle are called "fermions". Later Pauli postulated the existence of an uncharged invisible particle emitted along with an electron during beta decay, to satisfy the law of conservation of energy. Fermi took up this idea, developing a model that incorporated the postulated particle, which he named the "neutrino". His theory, later referred to as Fermi's interaction and still later as weak interaction, described one of the four fundamental forces of nature. Through experiments inducing radioactivity with recently discovered neutrons, Fermi discovered that slow neutrons were more easily captured than fast ones, and developed the Fermi age equation to describe this. After bombarding thorium and uranium with slow neutrons, he concluded that he had created new elements; although

Galileo Galilei

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Galileo Galilei
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I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Galileo Galilei
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I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Galileo Galilei
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I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
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I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Galileo Galilei
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Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.
Galileo Galilei
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I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations - Galileo Galilei

 

Galileo Galilei (15 February 1564– 8 January 1642) was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism. Galileo has been called the "father of modern observational astronomy", the "father of modern physics", the "father of science", and "the Father of Modern Science".

I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.
Galileo Galilei
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Benjamin Franklin

    Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. -Benjamin Franklin 

           His discoveries resulted from his investigations of electricity. Franklin proposed that "vitreous" and "resinous" electricity were not different types of "electrical fluid" (as electricity was called then), but the same electrical fluid under different pressures. He was the first to label them as positive and negative respectively, and he was the first to discover the principle of conservation of charge.

Paul Dirac

               It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it. You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that nature is so constructed. We simply have to accept it. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Our feeble attempts at mathematics enable us to understand a bit of the universe, and as we proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we can hope to understand the universe better.- Paul Dirac.

Richard P. Feynman

      

    It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.
- Richard P. Feynman 

Richard Phillips Feynman was an American theoretical physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics (he proposed the parton model).  

Albert Einstein

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. -Albert Einstein

A physical system has a property called energy and a corresponding property called mass; the two properties are equivalent in that they are always both present in the same (i.e. constant) proportion to one another. Mass–energy equivalence arose originally from special relativity, as developed by Albert Einstein, who proposed this equivalence in 1905 in one of his Annus Mirabilis papers entitled "Does the inertia of an object depend upon its energy-content?"The equivalence is described by the famous equation:

 

wolfgang pauli

“I confess, that very different from you, I do find sometimes scientific inspiration in mysticism … but this is counterbalanced by an immediate sense for mathematics.”
― Wolfgang Pauli 

The Pauli exclusion principle is the quantum mechanical principle that no two identical fermions (particles with half-integer spin) may occupy the same quantum state simultaneously. A more rigorous statement is that the total wave function for two identical fermions is anti-symmetric with respect to exchange of the particles. The principle was formulated by Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1925.

Wolfgang Pauli was born in Vienna in 1900, the same year that quantum mechanics itself was born with Planck’s announcement of the idea of the energy quanta. Pauli’s father was a physician and chemistry professor at the University of Vienna, and his godfather was Ernest Mach. As a young prodigy, when he found himself bored during class, Pauli would read Einstein’s papers on relativity. By age 20 Pauli, then a student of Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich, had published papers on relativity and written an encyclopedia article on relativity which greatly impressed other physicists, including Albert Einstein himself. Having learned classical mechanics and relativity, Pauli was disconcerted by quantum mechanics upon being introduced to it by Sommerfeld, and at first he found the subject rather confused

Erwin Schrodinger:

“I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity.

Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.”
― Erwin Schrödinger

In quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation is a partial differential equation that describes how the quantum state of some physical system changes with time. It was formulated in late 1925, and published in 1926, by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger.

 

Schrödinger's "paradox"

In a world governed by the second law of thermodynamics, all isolated systems are expected to approach a state of maximum disorder. Since life approaches and maintains a highly ordered state - some argue that this seems to violate the aforementioned Second Law implicating a paradox. However, since life is not an isolated system, there is no paradox. The increase of order inside an organism is more than paid for by an increase in disorder outside this organism. By this mechanism, the Second Law is obeyed, and life maintains a highly ordered state, which it sustains by causing a net increase in disorder in the Universe. In order to increase the complexity on Earth - as life does - energy is needed. Most of the energy for life here on Earth is provided by the Sun. (Some is provided by natural radioactivity, a form of nuclear energy which is a residue of the energy of the supernovae from which came the dust that formed the planets of the solar system).