Barrow (1996), John D., and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford University Press 1986, 1996 'This wide-ranging and detailed book explores the many ramifications of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, covering the whole spectrum of human inquiry from Aristotle to Z bosons. Bringing a unique combination of skills and knowledge to the subject, John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler - two of the world's leading cosmologists - cover the definition and nature of life, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the interpretation of the quantum theory in relation to the existence of observers.' 
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Feynman (1988), Richard, QED: The Strange Story of Light and Matter, Princeton UP 1988 Jacket: 'Quantum electrodynamics - or QED for short - is the 'strange theory' that explains how light and electrons interact. Thanks to Richard Feynmann and his colleagues, it is also one of the rare parts of physics that is known for sure, a theory that has stood the test of time. . . . In this beautifully lucid set of lectures he provides a definitive introduction to QED.' 
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Pais (1982), Abraham, 'Subtle is the Lord...': The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford UP 1982 Jacket: In this . . . major work Abraham Pais, himself an eminent physicist who worked alongside Einstein in the post-war years, traces the development of Einstein's entire ouvre. . . . Running through the book is a completely non-scientific biography . . . including many letters which appear in English for the first time, as well as other information not published before.' [Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft is er nicht] 
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Pais (1986), Abraham, Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World, Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press 1986 Preface: 'I will attempt to describe what has been discovered and understood about the constituents of matter, the laws to which they are subject and the forces that act on them [in the period 1895-1983]. . . . I will attempt to convey that these have been times of progress and stagnation, of order and chaos, of belief and incredulity, of the conventional and the bizarre; also of revolutionaries and conservatives, of science by individuals and by consortia, of little gadgets and big machines, and of modest funds and big moneys.' AP 
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Al Jazeera (2023_11_15), Why is Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital so important for the Israeli army?, ' Ever since the Israeli army’s strikes on the Gaza Strip began after the October 7 Hamas attack, the al-Shifa Hospital in the northern part of the besieged enclave has been prominently featured in the news. For the past five days, it has been at the centre of everything as Gaza’s death toll has risen, with more than 11,500 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, killed by Israeli forces. Brutal scenes are unfolding at the hospital as snipers have spent days shooting at anyone trying to move from one medical building to the other, prompting international outcries. But the Israeli army appears unfazed The significance of al-Shifa Hospital is beyond the medical. The storied medical complex, whose name translates into “House of Healing”, has been described as the beating heart of Gaza. It has been there since the time of the British rule over Palestine and became a hospital in 1946 after originally housing British army barracks. It has survived several wars and many years of Israeli occupation. Since last month, it has been denied urgently needed supplies of medicine and fuel – and that was before Israeli troops broke in and blew up its dwindling stores of medicine. Hospital staff had to bury dozens of people in a mass grave on the grounds as they were out of options. Dead bodies lie around its courtyard still. Beyond that, al-Shifa is seen as a nerve centre for the Gaza government’s administrative bodies. Health ministry officials have held press conferences amid the corpses there, and the government’s media ministry has operated out of the hospital. Al-Shifa kept its internet connectivity at times when the rest of Gaza was cut off by Israel, so it has also been a hot spot for journalists, some of whom are trapped there now. The hospital’s director and its doctors and staff have been providing constant updates whenever possible, often rejecting Israeli claims – like one on Wednesday that it had allowed aid into the hospital.' back

Albert Einstein (1905), On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, An english translation of the paper that founded Special relativity. 'Examples of this sort, [in the contemporary application of Maxwell's electrodynamics to moving bodies] together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the ``light medium,'' suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good.' back

Albert Einstein (1905c), On a heuristic point of view concerning the production and transformation of light, ' The wave theory of light, which operates with continuous spatial functions, has proved itself splendidly in describing purely optical phenomena and will probably never be replaced by another theory. One should keep in mind, however, that optical observations apply to time averages and not to momentary values, and it is conceivable that despite the complete confirmation of the theories of diffraction, reflection, refraction, dispersion, etc., by experiment, the theory of light, which operates with continuous spatial functions, may lead to contradictions with experience when it is applied to the phenomena of production and transformation of light. Indeed, it seems to me that the observations regarding "black-body" light, and other groups of phenomena associated with the production or conversion of light can be understood better if one assumes that the energy of light is discontinuously distributed in space.' back

Cosmological constant problem - Wikipedia, Cosmological constant problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In cosmology, the cosmological constant problem or vacuum catastrophe is the disagreement between the observed values of vacuum energy density (the small value of the cosmological constant) and theoretical large value of zero-point energy suggested by quantum field theory. Depending on the Planck energy cutoff and other factors, the discrepancy is as high as 120 orders of magnitude, a state of affairs described by physicists as "the largest discrepancy between theory and experiment in all of science" and "the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics".' back

Frederica Marsi, Sunak battles Supreme Court ruling: What next for the UK’s Rwanda plan?, ' Hours after the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court ruled that the government’s plan to send asylum seekers to the African country was unlawful, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak promised to introduce emergency legislation that confirms that Rwanda is a safe country. The emergency legislation “will provide a guarantee in law that those who are relocated from the UK to Rwanda will be protected against removal from Rwanda.” It will also “ensure that people cannot further delay flights by bringing systemic challenges in our domestic courts, and stop our policy being repeatedly blocked,” Sunak told reporters on Wednesday. The announcement came as human rights groups celebrated the Supreme Court decision, stating that asylum seekers would be at “risk of ill-treatment” if sent back to their home countries once in Rwanda. A joint civil society statement signed by 140 organisations, including prominent campaign groups such as the Runnymede Trust and Liberty, had described the plan as “cruel and immoral”. “We urge the Government to immediately abandon such plans with Rwanda or with any other country, and instead protect the rights of people who have come to our country in search of sanctuary,” it said. Maddie Harris, founder of the UK-based Humans for Rights Network – which also signed the statement – said the Supreme Court had made it “abundantly clear that Rwanda causes a serious risk to individuals in terms of refoulement to countries where they may face persecution or death”. “An emergency law does not eliminate that risk. What the [UK] government is saying is: ‘We don’t care if we send people back to their death,’” she told Al Jazeera.' back

Julian Borger, IDF evidence so far falls well short of al-Shifa hospital being Hamas HQ, ' Prior to their capture of Dar al-Shifa hospital, the Israel Defense Forces went to great lengths to depict the medical complex as a headquarters for Hamas, from where its attacks on Israel were planned. The evidence produced so far falls well short of that. IDF videos have shown only modest collections of small arms, mostly assault rifles, recovered from the extensive medical complex. That suggests an armed presence, but not the sort of elaborate nerve centre depicted in animated graphics presented to the media before al-Shifa was seized, portraying a network of well-equipped subterranean chambers. Even the videos produced so far have raised questions under scrutiny. A BBC analysis found the footage of an IDF spokesperson showing the apparent discovery of a bag containing a gun behind an MRI scanning machine, had been taped hours before the arrival of the journalists to whom he was supposedly showing it. . . .. The Biden administration has not only defended Israel’s operations but presented independent claims based on its own intelligence about the hospital. John Kirby, the White House national security spokesperson, framed the alleged Hamas facility there as a command “node” rather than a centre, and a possible weapons store. The absence of evidence so far, is beginning to recall past US intelligence failures, most dramatically those preceding the Iraq invasion. It further isolates Washington on the world stage, and deepens already significant rifts within the administration itself.' back

Jürgen Knauer , Plants are likely to absorb more CO₂ in a changing climate than we thought – here’s why, ' The world’s vegetation has a remarkable ability to absorb carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the air and store it as biomass. In doing so, plants slow down climate change since the CO₂ they take up does not contribute to global warming. But what will happen under more advanced climate change? How will vegetation respond to projected changes in atmospheric CO₂, temperatures and rainfall? Our study, published today in Science Advances, shows plants might take up more CO₂ than previously thought. back

Lynley Wallia, Heather Bourke & Troy Meston, Our mapping project shows how extensive frontier violence was in Queensland. This is why truth-telling matters, ' Detachments of troopers were regularly sent out on patrol, covering large areas along the frontier of the colony in pursuit of Indigenous people who were considered to be “problematic”. Their main job was to protect civilian settlers, the lands they had taken up, and their livelihoods - by whatever means necessary. While on patrol, the Native Mounted Police are known to have engaged in violence against Aboriginal people, including killings of men, women and children, kidnappings, rape, and the forcible removal of children. Truth-telling will mean coming to terms with this violence. Their actions radically altered the makeup of First Nations groups, diminished their populations, and changed where and how survivors could live.. . . All together, we mapped more than 2,500 of these conflict events across colonial Queensland from 1623 until 1911. Our findings show violence occurred everywhere, but was especially common along the east coast and on Cape York Peninsula. . . .. Historians Raymond Evans and Robert Ørsted-Jensen have estimated some 41,000 Aboriginal people could have been killed at the hands of the Native Mounted Police between 1859 and 1897. Their estimate was based on reasonable and minimal assumptions drawn from historical documents and an average seven-year lifespan per camp. Extending the duration of a camp to 13 years, in line with our newly identified data, increases the total deaths to potentially over 60,000.' back

P versus NP problem - Wikipedia, P versus NP problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The P versus NP problem is a major unsolved problem in computer science. It asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly verified (technically, verified in polynomial time) can also be solved quickly (again, in polynomial time). The underlying issues were first discussed in the 1950s, in letters from John Forbes Nash Jr. to the National Security Agency, and from Kurt Gödel to John von Neumann. The precise statement of the P versus NP problem was introduced in 1971 by Stephen Cook in his seminal paper " The complexity of theorem proving procedures" and is considered by many to be the most important open problem in the field.' back

P. A. M. Dirac (1933), The Lagrangian in Quantum Mechanics, ' . . . there is an alternative formulation [to the Hamiltonian] in classical dynamics, provided by the Lagrangian. This requires one to work in terms of coordinates and velocities instead of coordinates and momenta. The two formulation are closely related but there are reasons for believing that the Lagrangian one is more fundamental. . . . Secondly the lagrangian method can easily be expressed relativistically, on account of the action function being a relativistic invariant; . . .. ' [This article was first published in Physikalische Zeitschrift der Sowjetunion, Band 3, Heft 1 (1933), pp. 64–72.] back

Path integral formulation - Wikipedia, Path integral formulation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The path integral formulation of quantum mechanics is a description of quantum theory which generalizes the action principle of classical mechanics. It replaces the classical notion of a single, unique trajectory for a system with a sum, or functional integral, over an infinity of possible trajectories to compute a quantum amplitude. . . . This formulation has proved crucial to the subsequent development of theoretical physics, since it provided the basis for the grand synthesis of the 1970s which unified quantum field theory with statistical mechanics. . . . ' back

Peter John McLaughlin, Suella Braverman’s comments comparing Gaza protests with Northern Ireland are a grave misunderstanding of the facts, ' Braverman later insisted she was indeed referring to dissident republicanism. And republicans do also participate in marches, but historically the most significant of these have been civil rights demonstrations to highlight the discrimination faced by the Catholic community. These marches were largely banned by the then Unionist government – something which Braverman appears to want in the case of the London protests, though she has denied this. Unionists justified their bans by making the same insinuations that Braverman makes in her Times article – that such marches can be a front for violent subversives. However, the violence triggered by civil rights marches in Northern Ireland was mainly enacted by the state – most famously and tragically of all on Bloody Sunday in January 1972, when the British army shot dead protesters, resulting in 14 deaths. The march on Bloody Sunday was a protest against the use of internment without trial in Northern Ireland. Like the freedoms of expression and assembly – both of which are exercised in the Gaza protests – freedom from unlawful imprisonment is a fundamental democratic right. Indeed it is a fundamentally British right, given its place in the Magna Carta. Worryingly, Braverman, the home secretary, and thus a key figure in upholding British law, would seem to be struggling with such concepts.' back

Planck units - Wikipedia, Planck units - Wikipedia, the free encycloedia, ' In particle physics and physical cosmology, Planck units are a set of units of measurement defined exclusively in terms of four universal physical constants, in such a manner that these physical constants take on the numerical value of 1 when expressed in terms of these units. . Originally proposed in 1899 by German physicist Max Planck, these units are also known as natural units because the origin of their definition comes only from properties of nature and not from any human construct. Planck units are only one system of several systems of natural units, but Planck units are not based on properties of any prototype object or particle (that would be arbitrarily chosen), but rather on only the properties of free space.' back