 "We are dealing with a system of particles whose number is neither small enough to allow direct solution nor large enough to make statistical methods highly accurate, and which interact through an interaction that has still not been pinned down to any definite form. It is this extraordinary difficulty and the freedom with which methods and ideas from many other branches are applied here that make nuclear structure physics so fascinating and so much alive." Joachim A. Maruhn Nuclear Models (Springer, 1996) Walter Greiner |
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"The
composition of matter as we see it today is the product
of
 nuclear reactions which have taken place a long time ago in the stars or in star explosions, where conditions prevailed which we simulate in a very microscopic way within our accelerating machines. Hence the material basis of the world in which we live is a product of the laws of nuclear physics. I cannot better illustrate the interconnection of all facts of nature, the tightly woven net of the laws of physics, than by pointing to the chart of abundances of elements in our part of the universe. Each maximum and minimum in the curve of abundances corresponds to some trait of nuclear dynamics, here a closed shell, there a strong neutron cross section, or a low binding energy." |
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 "How
many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?" I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, "Four." He said, "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." With that, the conversation was over.
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 "Each of these models fits the NN database extremely well, with c2 per degree of freedom near one. The cost of this excellent fit is a rather large number of parameters; the Argonne v18 interaction has 40 adjustable parameters and the other modern interaction models have a similar number." J. Carlson and R. Schiavilla, Structure and dynamics of few-nucleon systems Reviews of Modern Physics 7, 743 (1998) |
