A Half-Century of Quantum Physics

J. Leite Lopes, Michel Paty

A. Isihara

A brief review of the developments of statistical physics, especially during the latter half of this century, is given, with focus on many body theory, followed by discussions of the future outlook or directions in several selected areas.

David J. Gross

Brigitte Falkenburg

The article investigates the way in which Peter Mittelstaedt has been con- tributing to the philosophy of physics for half a century. It is shown that he pursues a path between rationalism and empiricism in the sense of Erhard Scheibe's philosophy of the physicists. Starting from Kant's a priori he gives a rational reconstruction of the conceptual revolutions of 20th century physics. The central topic of his philosophy of physics is the quest for semantic self-consistency, which for quantum mechanics is a hard nut to crack.

Aryan Singh Lather

The study of many-body physics has provided a scientific playground of surprise and continuing revolution over the past half century. The serendipitous discovery of new states and properties of matter, phenomena such as superfluidity, the Meissner, the Kondo and the fractional quantum hall effects, have driven the development of new conceptual frameworks for our understanding about collective behaviour, the ramifications of which have spread far beyond the confines of terrestrial condensed matter physics- to cosmology, nuclear and particle physics. Here, we are selectively reviewing some of the developments in this field, from the cold-war period, until the present day. With the discovery of new classes of collective order, the unfolding puzzles of high temperature superconductivity and quantum criticality, the prospects for major conceptual discoveries remain as bright today as they were more than half a century ago.