Related papers: El universo de Einstein: 1905 - annus mirabilis - …
I argue that Einstein overlooked an important aspect of the relativity of time in never quite realizing his quest to embody Mach's principle in his theory of gravity. As a step towards that goal, I broaden the Strong Equivalence Principle…
Why is modern physics still today, more than 100 years after its birth, the privilege of an elite of scientists and unknown for the great majority of citizens? The answer is simple, since modern physics is in general not present in the…
We critically revisit Einstein's 1905 heuristic argument for lightquanta, considering its internal coherence and the scope of its applicability. We argue that Einstein's reasoning, often celebrated for its originality, is ambiguous because…
In 1963-71, a group of people, myself included, formulated and perfected a new approach to physics problems, which eventually came to be known under the names of scaling, universality, and renormalization. This work formed the basis of a…
This paper is an introduction to the eleven works of the special issue on Quantum and Classical Frontiers of Noise. The weather, and its butterfly effect, is the typical example that explain why many natural phenomena are, in fact, not…
In 1936, Albert Einstein wrote a brief article where he suggested the possibility that a massive object acted as a lens, amplifying the brightness of a star. As time went by, this phenomenon, known as gravitational lensing, has become a…
Albert Einstein's real "biggest blunder" was not the 1917 introduction into his gravitational field equations of a cosmological constant term \Lambda, rather was his failure in 1916 to distinguish between the entirely different concepts of…
The nature of gravity is fundamental to our understanding of our own solar system, the galaxy and the structure and evolution of the Universe. Einstein's general theory of relativity is the standard model that is used for almost ninety…
In Europe (e.g., in Italy), and in the States, the opinion is widely spreading that the negative consequences of modern progress are the fault of "Science". A lively debate on this topic took place among the famous writer Leonardo Sciascia…
One century after its formulation, Einstein's general relativity has made remarkable predictions and turned out to be compatible with all experimental tests. Most of these tests probe the theory in the weak-field regime, and there are…
We suggest that not only quanta may have played a role in Einstein's ideas on relativity, but that they themselves may be related to the dynamical and relativistic behaviour of the electromagnetic field exhibited in a Poincar\'e's 1900…
This note examines an apparently unpublished manuscript on special relativity written by Conrad Habicht in 1914 and made available online by the ETH-Bibliothek Z\"urich in December 2024. To the best of my knowledge, no study of its content…
Special relativity was discovered at the eve of the century, but finds its roots in the 19th century efforts to understand the optics and electromagnetism of moving bodies. These roots are reviewed in Parts 1 and 2, the latter being…
Although implicit in the discovery of the Schwarzschild solution 40 years earlier, the issues raised by the theory of what are now known as black holes were so unsettling to physicists of Einstein's generation that the subject remained in a…
Einstein, in his "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Korper", gave a physical (operational) meaning to "time" of a remote event in describing "motion" by introducing the concept of "synchronous stationary clocks located at different places". But…
Before 1905, Poincar\'e stressed the importance of the method of clocks and their synchronization, but unlike Einstein, magnet and conductor (asymmetries in Lorentz's theory regarding the explanation of Faraday's induction) or chasing a…
We briefly review a few aspects of the development of differential geometry which may be considered as being influenced by Einstein's general relativity. We focus on how Einstein's quest for a complete geometrization of matter and…
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of general relativity, the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation (ISGRG) commissioned a Centennial Volume, edited by the authors of this article. We jointly wrote introductions to…
In this article, we analyze the third of three papers, in which Einstein presented his quantum theory of the ideal gas of 1924-1925. Although it failed to attract the attention of Einstein's contemporaries and although also today very few…
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.…