Elmar Zeitler: A Rigorous and Jovial Physicist

A Physicist Looks at Biology

A mature physicist, acquainting himself for the first time with the problems of biology, is puzzled by the circumstance that there are no "absolute phenomena" in biology. Everything is time bound and space bound. The animal or plant or micro-organism he is working with is but a link in an evolutionary chain of changing forms, none of which has any permanent validity. Even the molecular species ...

A Call for the Structured Physicist Report.

Night Thoughts of a Quantum Physicist

The most dramatic developments in theoretical physics in the next millennium are likely to come when we make progress on so far unresolved foundational questions. In this essay I consider two of the deepest problems confronting us, the measurement problem in quantum theory and the problem of relating consciousness to the rest of physics. I survey some recent promising ideas on possible solution...

Why Isn't Every Physicist a Bohmian?

This note collects, classifies and evaluates common criticism against the deBroglie-Bohm theory, including Ockham’s razor, asymmetry in the deBroglie-Bohm theory, the “surreal trajectory” problem and relativistic generalizations. This controversy highlights that even in science theories can not solely be evaluated based on their empirical confirmation.

Categories for the practising physicist

In this chapter we survey some particular topics in category theory in a somewhat unconventional manner. Our main focus will be on monoidal categories, mainly symmetric ones, for which we propose a physical interpretation. Special attention is given to the category of sets and relations, posetal categories, diagrammatic calculi, strictification, compact categories, biproduct categories and abst...