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

Four dozen studies and essays written to mark the 90th birthday of Louis de Broglie and the 80th birthdays of Paul Dirac and Eugene Wigner.

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

9780521319119, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 26 July 1984

672 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 3.8 cm, 0.97 kg

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).

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.

Subject Areas: Physics [PH]