A Chorus of Bells and Other Scientific Inquiries

This book of essays in four parts, written over a decade and full of surprises for the breadth and variety of its subject matter. The first part is about the foundations of the quantum theory which reflects the author's many conversations with the late John Bell who persuaded him that there is still no satisfactory interpretation of the theory. The second part deals with nuclear weapons. One of the essays concerns the creation of the modern gas centrifuge which was done by German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. The proliferation of these centrifuges was one of the issues in the spread of nuclear weapons. The third section deals with financial engineering with a profile of Louis Bachelier, the French mathematician who created it at the beginning of the 20th century. The final section deals with the Higgs boson and how it is used for generating mass. It includes a detailed article of how this mechanism works.