Related papers: El universo de Einstein: 1905 - annus mirabilis - …
Art history linked some early 20th Century avant-garde visual art movements to contemporary systems of ideas in mathematics and theoretical physics. One of the proposed connections is the one that might have existed between Cubism and…
Albert Einstein made fundamental contributions to the development of quantum mechanics. However, he was never satisfied with the quantum worldview. In fact, during most of his life he attempted to find inconsistencies and paradoxes within…
.This article reexamines the genesis of special relativity by situating the contributions of Lorentz, Poincare, and Einstein within the scientific, documentary, and editorial context of the years 1895--1913. It emphasizes the rapid…
The Einstein Archives contain a considerable collection of calculations in the form of working sheets and scratch paper, documenting Einstein's scientific preoccupations during the last three decades of his life until his death in 1955.…
Albert Einstein visited Spain only once, precisely one hundred years ago. The circumstances, of a very different kind, of this visit will be explained here. In special, some important events happened to Einstein during that period, which,…
Soon after he proposed three classic observational tests for the general theory of relativity, Einstein realised that a consistent description of the universe as a whole provided another important challenge for the theory. In this essay, we…
It is shown as experiments and theories about the nature of light led to the special theory of relativity. The most important facts for the emergence of the theory proposed by Einstein in 1905 are presented.
The year 2015 was the International Year of Light. It marked, however, also the 20th anniversary of the first observation of Bose-Einstein condensation in atomic vapors by Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle. This discovery can…
Einstein's special theory of relativity starts with assumptions about how observations conducted in relatively moving inertial frames must compare. From these assumptions, conclusions can be drawn regarding the laws of physics in any one…
In his 1916's first paper on gravitational waves Einstein began to speculate on interactions between the principles of the old quantum theory and his theory of gravitation. With this contribution Einstein has stimulated a lot of similar…
Since its inception, quantum theory has been the subject of fierce interpretive controversy, which persists to this day. Disputed topics include the basic ontology and dynamics of the theory, the role (if any) of measurement, the meaning of…
The first three sections of this article contain a broad brush summary of the profound changes in the notion of time in fundamental physics that were brought about by three revolutions: the foundations of mechanics distilled by Newton in…
Relativity was Einstein's main research program and scientific project. It was an open-ended program that developed throughout Einstein's scientific career, giving rise to special relativity, general relativity and unified field theory. In…
A hundred years ago, two British expeditions measured the deflection of starlight by the sun's gravitational field, confirming the prediction made by Einstein's General theory of Relativity. One hundred years later many physicists around…
Metaphysics is the science of being and asks the question ``What really exists?'' The answer to this question has been sought for by mankind since the beginning of recorded time. In the past 2500 years there have been many answers to this…
Retrospectively, in 1905, Special Relativity seemed palpably close; it was "in the air". But apparently it needed the fresh approach of an unprejudiced newcomer, Einstein, to take the final step. I report, in a pedagogical fashion, on the…
Here I indulge in wide-ranging speculations on the shape of physics, and technology closely related to physics, over the next one hundred years. Themes include the many faces of unification, the re-imagining of quantum theory, and new forms…
In this Einstein Year of Physics it seems appropriate to look at an important aspect of Einstein's work that is often down-played: his contribution to the debate on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Contrary to popular opinion, Bohr…
In the year 1900 Max Planck was led by experimental observations to propose a strange formula for the intensity as a function of frequency for light emitted by a cavity. It relied on peculiar properties to be obeyed by the emitters and…
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…