Quantum Space and Time - The Quest Continues: Studies and Essays in Honour of Louis de Broglie, Paul Dirac and Eugene Wigner

by Asim O. Barut, Alwyn van der Merwe, Jean-Pierre Vigier

Overview

This 1984 book brings together 48 studies and essays written by physicists from around the world to mark the 90th birthday of Louis de Broglie and the 80th birthdays of Paul Dirac and Eugene Wigner. Publication under one cover of studies based on the discoveries of scientific personalities as diverse as those to whom this volume is dedicated serves at least one important purpose: it concretely reflects the rival pathways in quantum physics at the time of this book's publication. From one perspective, the papers contrast the strategies of a champion of the mathematical approach (Wigner) with those of a thinker who relied on physical intuition (de Broglie). From another, they compare the views of a defender (Wigner) and and opponent of the Copenhagen school (de Broglie), as well as those of an individual who helped to reconstruct the prevailing quantal paradigm, only later to advocate a return to causality (Dirac).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521319119
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/26/1984
Series:	Cambridge Monographs on Physics
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	672
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 1.50(d)

Table of Contents

Part I. Papers Dedicated to Louis de Broglie: 1. Louis de Broglie - physicist and thinker; 2. The evolution of the ideas of Louis de Broglie on the interpretation of wave mechanics; 3. Editorial postscript to 'The evolution of the ideas of Louis de Broglie on the interpretation of wave mechanics'; 4. Reminiscences on my early association with Louis de Broglie; 5. A critical note on the greatest days of quantum theory; 6. On the contribution of Louis de Broglie to the quantum theory of measurement; 7. On the impossible pilot wave; 8. The de Broglie pilot wave theory and the further development of new insights arising out of it; 9. Does quantum mechanics accept a stochastic support?; 10. Survey of a quark model; 11. De Broglie's wave-particle duality in the stochastic interpretation of quantum mechanics: as testable assumption; 12. Elucidation of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics and definition of a compatible joint probability; 13. On the direct observability of quantum waves; 14. Quantum theory and Einstein's general relativity; Part II. Papers dedicated to Eugene Paul Wigner: 15. To Eugene Paul Wigner on his eightieth birthday; 16. On conservation of parity and time reversal and composite models of particles; 17. The 'Sommerfeld puzzle' revisited and resolved; 18. An approach to measurement; 19. Angular-momentum theory and projective geometry; 20. The Wigner phase-space description of collision processes; 21. Accidental degeneracies and symmetry groups; 22. The Wigner distribution function - 50th birthday; 23. Invariance identities associated with finite gauge transformations and the uniqueness of the equations of motion of a particle in a classical gauge field; 24. Muonic atoms testing the electron propagator of quantum electrodynamics and the Higgs boson contribution; 25. Physics and geometry; 26. Galilei invariance, action-reaction principle and centre of mass theorem; 27. The geometrostatic lattice cell; 28. Branching rules and replicating representations; 29. Some double-valued representations of the linear groups; Part III. Papers Dedicated to Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac: 30. Paul Dirac on his eightieth birthday; 31. Nonperturbative quantum electrodynamics: the Lamb shift; 32. Magnetic monopoles: evidence since the Dirac conjecture; 33. Bootstrapping the photon; 34. Visible and invisible in physical theory; 35. Dirac's aether in relativistic quantum mechanics; 36. A Dirac algebraic approach to supersymmetry; 37. Manifestations of group convariance in metric theory; 38. Cosmologies with variable gravitational constant; 39. Spinors and torsion in general relativity; 40. A modified large-number theory with constant G; 41. Is physics at the threshold of a new stage of evolution?; 42. The biometric Weyl–Dirac theory and the gravitational constant; 43. Electromagnetic mass revisited; 44. Forms of relativistic dynamics with world line condition and separability; 45. New avenues in supersymmetry and supergravity; 46. On the equivalence of adiabatic invariance and the KMS condition; Author index; Subject index.