Related papers: Philosophy and Relativity
This article offers a critical engagement with J\"urgen Renn's historiographical approach, with particular focus on "The Evolution of Knowledge" and "The Einsteinian Revolution" (co-authored with Hanoch Gutfreund). It explores how Renn…
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…
There is no doubt that both the special and general theories of relativity capture the imagination. The anti-intuitive properties of the special theory of relativity and its deep philosophical implications, the bizzare and dazzling…
I discuss the ontological assumptions and implications of General Relativity. I maintain that General Relativity is a theory about gravitational fields, not about space-time. The latter is a more basic ontological category, that emerges…
The recent discovery that Einstein once attempted - and quickly abandoned - a steady-state model of the expanding universe sheds new light on his philosophical journey from static to dynamic cosmologies.
On his way to General Relativity (GR) Einstein gave several arguments as to why a special relativistic theory of gravity based on a massless scalar field could be ruled out merely on grounds of theoretical considerations. We re-investigate…
Henri Poincare's work on mathematical features of the Lorentz transformations was an important precursor to the development of special relativity. In this paper I compare the approaches taken by Poincare and Einstein, aiming to come to an…
We review the foundations of Einstein's general theory of relativity, discuss recent progress in the tests of relativistic gravity, and present motivations for new generation of high-accuracy gravitational experiments. We discuss the…
The problematic relationship between science and philosophy has, since the beginning of modernity, divided the world into two separate domains: nature and human. Some of today's schools of philosophy and epistemological inquiry have…
Between 1905 and 1907, Einstein first tried to extend the special theory of relativity in such a way so as to explain gravitational phenomena. This was the most natural and simplest path to be taken. These investigations did not fit in with…
While Special and General Relativity are well known by a very large number of people, Einstein's religious convinctions are almost ignored. The paper focuses on what was his view about immortality. Einstein believed in Spinoza's view of God…
Einstein's theory of general relativity models the physical universe using spacetimes which satisfy Einstein's gravitational field equations. To date, Einstein's theory has been enormously successful in modeling observed gravitational…
This is a semipopular introduction to the Special and General Theory of Relativity, with special emphasis on the geometrical aspects of both theories and their physical implications.
This is a brief introduction to general relativity, designed for both students and teachers of the subject. While there are many excellent expositions of general relativity, few adequately explain the geometrical meaning of the basic…
Einstein's genius and penetrating physical intuition led to the general theory of relativity, which incorporates gravity into the geometry of spacetime. However, the theory of general relativity leads to perspectives which go far beyond the…
Kantian philosophy of space, time and gravity is significantly affected in three ways by particle physics. First, particle physics deflects Schlick's General Relativity-based critique of synthetic a priori knowledge. Schlick argued that…
Since antiquity, from Euclid of Alexandria to Galileo Galilei to Immanuel Kant to Hermann Minkowksi to Albert Einstein, the question of the nature of space and time has occupied scientists and philosophers. In the four-dimensional…
As is well-known, Newton's gravitational theory can be formulated as a four-dimensional space-time theory and follows as singular limit from Einstein's theory, if the velocity of light tends to the infinity. Here 'singular' stands for the…
Newton's mechanical revolution unifies the motion of planets in the sky and falling of apple on earth. Maxwell's electromagnetic revolution unifies electricity, magnetism, and light. Einstein's relativity revolution unifies space with time,…
In this dissertation the question of the unification of quantum theory and general relativity is treated. Based on the conceptual structure of these theories and under incorporation of certain ideas from classical philosophy there are…