Related papers: The Einstein-Varicak Correspondence on Relativisti…
The connection between spin and symmetry was established by Wigner in his 1939 paper on the Poincar\'e group. For a massive particle at rest, the little group is O(3) from which the concept of spin emerges. The little group for a massless…
Heisenberg's breakthrough in his July 1925 paper that set in motion the development of Quantum Mechanics through subsequent papers by Born, Jordan, Heisenberg and also Dirac (from 1925 to 1927) is reexamined through a modern lens. In this…
There is a myth that Einstein's discovery of general relativity was due to his following beautiful mathematics to discover new insights about nature. I argue that this is an incorrect reading of the history and that what Einstein did was to…
Einsteins general theory of relativity is one of the most important accomplishments in the history of science. Its experimental verification a century ago is therefore an essential milestone that is worth celebrating in full. We reassess…
We first see that the inertia of Newtonian mechanics is absolute and troublesome. General relativity can be viewed as Einstein's attempt to remedy, by making inertia relative, to matter---perhaps imperfectly though, as at least a couple of…
We comment on the paper [1] by Albert Einstein from 1918 to Willem De Sitter's solution [2] of the Einstein field equation from today's point of view. To this end, we start by describing the geometry of the De Sitter space-time and present…
With the theory of general relativity, Einstein abolished the interpretation of gravitation as a force and associated it to the curvature of spacetime. Tensorial calculus and differential geometry are the mathematical resources necessary to…
The question how to Lorentz transform an N-particle wave function naturally leads to the concept of a so-called multi-time wave function, i.e. a map from (space-time)^N to a spin space. This concept was originally proposed by Dirac as the…
This paper aims to discuss two issues that can have a significant impact on the foundations of the theory of gravitation: (1). The existence of relativity of space-time geometry with respect to the properties of used reference frame, which…
Corrections to the relativistic orbits are studied considering higher order approximations induced by gravitomagnetic effects. We discuss in details how such corrections come out taking into account magnetic components in the weak field…
The objective of this paper is not simply to present an historical overview of Einstein's cosmological considerations, but to discuss the central role they played in shaping the paradigm of relativistic cosmology. This, we'll show, was a…
We argue that in the general relativistic calculation of planetary orbits, the choice of a reference frame which is an obligatory condition in the Newtonian approach is replaced by an appropriate boundary condition on the solution of…
We investigate the nonrelativistic limit of the gravitationally coupled Dirac Equation via a Foldy-Wouthuysen transformation. The relativistic correction terms have immediate and obvious physical interpretations in terms of a gravitational…
I review the paper of Majorana about relativistic particles with arbitrary spin written in 1932. The main motivation for this papers was the dissatisfaction about the negative energy solutions of the Dirac equation. As such, the paper…
In the year 1924, a paper by Carl Wirtz appeared in Astronomische Nachrichten, entitled 'De Sitter's cosmology and the radial motion of spiral galaxies'. This paper and its author remained largely unnoticed by the community, but it seems to…
A formula for the apparent rotation of a relativistically moving object has been known for some time, but it seems not to have been realized that this formula has a very pretty interpretation in terms of formal group laws. Version 2…
The book presents ideas by H. Poincare and H. Minkowski according to those the essence and the main content of the relativity theory are the following: the space and time form a unique four-dimensional continuum supplied by the…
This is a popular lecture about the history of gravitational wave research. Without any doubt, the discovery of gravitational waves is the most important event in the physics of the last decade along with the discovery of the Higgs boson.…
Neither the world nor science came to an end when the gunfire stopped on 11 November 1918 (close to 11 AM in some time zone), but neither would ever be the same again. Part I of this inquiry (Observatory 138, 46-58, April 2018) looked at…
We prove that, given a stress-free, axially symmetric elastic body, there exists, for sufficiently small values of the gravitational constant and of the angular frequency, a unique stationary axisymmetric solution to the Einstein equations…