Related papers: Between Pacifism and Nuclear Energy (1930-1955)
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…
The Introduction in this paper underlines the present general situation for energy and the environment using the words of the US Secretary of Energy. A short presentation is made of some major nuclear power plants used to study one…
"I have dealt with many different transformations with various periods of time, but the quickest that I have met was my own transformation in one moment from a physicist to a chemist." Ernest Rutherford (Nobel Banquet, 1908) This article is…
In 1922, Albert Einstein visited Paris and interacted extensively with an illustrious section of the French academia. In overfilled sessions at the Coll\'{e}ge de France and the Sorbonne, Einstein explained his theories of relativity, and…
The relationships among various parameters describing the strength of optical transitions in atoms and molecules are reviewed. The application of these parameters to the description of the interaction between nearly monochromatic,…
The idea of atoms is old but X-rays provided the first probe into the physical atom. Photographs of X-ray scattering from crystals -Laue spots- were the first visual proof for the physical existence of atoms arranged in a perfect geometric…
It is known that Einstein's conceptual base for his theory of relativity was the philosophy formulated by Immanuel Kant. Things appear differently to observers in different frames. However, Kant's Ding-an-Sich leads to the existence of the…
Two important and unpleasant events occurred in Albert Einstein's life in 1920: That August an antirelativity rally was held in the large auditorium of the Berlin Philharmonic, and a few weeks later Einstein was drawn into a tense and…
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…
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…
In 1905, Einstein formulated his special relativity for point particles. For those particles, his Lorentz covariance and energy-momentum relation are by now firmly established. How about the hydrogen atom? It is possible to perform Lorentz…
This essay gives a short, informal account of the development of digital logic from the Pleistocene to the Manhattan Project, the introduction of reversible circuits, and Richard Feynman's allied proposal for quantum computing. We argue…
Einstein initially objected to the probabilistic aspect of quantum mechanics - the idea that God is playing at dice. Later he changed his ground, and focussed instead on the point that the Copenhagen Interpretation leads to what Einstein…
In 1907, Einstein suggested an experiment with flying atoms for corroborating time dilation. In that paper, the flying atom was conceived as a flying clock: the reference to the Doppler effect was only indirect (the experiments by Stark to…
This paper explores the ER bridges theory and its relationship with quantum phenomena. An argument can be made that the ER bridges theory does not explicitly address quantum phenomena and implies that Einstein intended to differentiate…
Dawning neutron physics was more complex than one might expect. The chance that the neutron comprised a proton and an electron was diffusely taken into account after the discovery of the neutron. Moreover, uncertainties persisted about the…
This report is based on a series of papers written between 1980 and 2005 on the origin of Iraq's nuclear weapons program, which was known to one of the authors in the late 1970s already, as well as to a number of other physicists, who…
Einstein's 1935 critique of quantum mechanics is often associated with the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) argument, yet his private correspondence from that year reveals a more exact conceptual structure guiding his claim that the…
In this note, we point attention to and briefly discuss a curious manuscript of Einstein, composed in 1938 and entitled "Unified Field Theory," the only such writing, published or unpublished, carrying this title without any further…
The onset and the development of the concept of exchange force in quantum physics are historically reconstructed, starting from Heisenberg's seminal contributions in 1926 and going through the great developments in nuclear physics, which…