Related papers: Between Pacifism and Nuclear Energy (1930-1955)
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…
Supported only in the two 1905 Einstein's papers on Relativity and a very rigid respect for the historical context, an analysis is done of the derivation of the universal mass-energy relationship. It is found, contrary to the today accepted…
The concept of fact has a history. Over the past centuries, physicists have appropriated it in various ways. In this article, we compare Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein's interpretations of the concept. Mach, like most nineteenth-century…
We present a translation and analysis of an unpublished manuscript by Albert Einstein in which he attempted to construct a 'steady-state' model of the universe. The manuscript, which appears to have been written in early 1931, demonstrates…
In 1917 Einstein initiated modern cosmology by postulating, based on general relativity, a homogeneous, static, spatially curved universe. To counteract gravitational contraction he introduced the cosmological constant. In 1922 Alexander…
A complete theoretical model describing artificial disintegration of nuclei by bombardment with alpha-particles, developed by Majorana as early as in 1930, is discussed in detail alongside the basic experimental evidences that motivated it.…
Humankind is confronted with a "nuclear stewardship curse", facing the prospect of needing to manage nuclear products over long time scales in the face of the short-time scales of human polities. I propose a super Manhattan-type effort to…
Salam's biographies claim that he was opposed to Pakistan's nuclear weapon programme. This is somewhat strange given that he was the senior Science Advisor to the Pakistan government for at least some of the period between 1972 when the…
Even if Einstein brought major contributions as a founder of quantum mechanics, he remained deeply unsatisfied with the bases of this structure he knew to be so efficient for physics. His critics are often known through his numerous…
The Bohr--Einstein debate is one of the more remarkable protracted intellectual exchanges in the history of physics. Its influence has been lasting: One of the few clear patterns in a 2013 survey about quantum foundations was that the…
Einstein is usually revered as the father of special and general relativity. In this article I demonstrate that he is also the father of Solid State Physics, or even his broader version known as Condensed Matter Physics (including liquids).…
In the year 1905 Albert Einstein published four papers that raised him to a giant in the history of science of all times. These works encompass the photon hypothesis (for which he obtained the Nobel prize in 1921), his first two papers on…
In his monumental discoveries, the driving force for Einstein was, I believe, consistency of concept and principle rather than conflict with experiment. In this spirit, I would like to look at the journey from the classical to the…
Einstein's contribution to relativity is reviewed. It is pointed out that Weyl gave first unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism and it was different than the five dimensional theory of Kaluza. Einstein began his work on…
The Italian civil nuclear projects had a very early origin, with the first ideas originating as far back as 1945. The construction of the first three plants dated back to the period 1956-1964, and at that time Italy ranked third in the…
It took eight years after Einstein announced the basic physical ideas behind the relativistic gravity theory before the proper mathematical formulation of general relativity was mastered. The efforts of the greatest physicist and of the…
We discuss, from a historiographical point of view, which was the degree of certainty that the physicists directly involved in the birth of Quantum Mechanics (Heisenberg, Born, Jordan, Dirac and Schr\"odinger) gave to the atomistic…
Between 1935 and 1936, Einstein was occupied with the Schwarzschild solution and the singularity within it while working in Princeton on the unified field theory and with his assistant Nathan Rosen, on the theory of the Einstein-Rosen…
In 1924, Einstein received a short manuscript in the mail from the Indian physicist S.N. Bose. He quickly translated Bose's manuscript to German and submitted it to Zeitschrift f\"ur Physik. Within a few weeks, Einstein presented his own…
Year 2005 was the World Year of Physics, and it was commemorated worldwide as the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's legendary works in which the foundations of at least three areas of modern physics were laid: statistical mechanics,…