Abstracts Archive

Astronomers like to present their discipline as the oldest science as well as the most international one. Who cares about earthly borders when contemplating the great beyond? Astronomers have claimed that their science has never been affected by worldly politics, even while recognizing the enormous ...

Physicists often praise quantum electrodynamics (QED) as “the most precise scientific theory ever constructed”. Its calculations depend on a technique called renormalization, which was developed circa 1947 by Hans Bethe, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, and Richard Feynman. That technique m...

The indirect amalgamation technology, developed by Ignaz von Born following older methods from the Spanish colonies, was intended to be nothing less than a revolutionary method of extraction of precious metals using mercury. Between 1784 and 1786, the Austrian mineralogist and mining expert Born dev...

There is a "folk history" of quantum physics within the community of physicists, one that bears little resemblance to the history of the field. According to this folk history, there is a single orthodox "Copenhagen interpretation" which solves or dissolves all of the questions at the foundations of ...