Related papers: On the first Solvay Congress in 1911
Since its serendipitous discovery in 1896 by Henry Becquerel, radioactivity has called the attention of both the scientific community and the broad audience due to its intriguing nature, its multiple applications and its controversial uses.…
Stefan-Boltzmann law was empirically deduced by Stefan in 1874 by fitting existing experiments and theoretically validated by Boltzmann in 1884 on the basis of a classical model involving thermodynamics principles and the Maxwell equations.…
Since 2006 a small group of researchers from the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics started to realized one of the first European Researchers' Night in Europe: a one night-event, supported by the European Commission, that falls…
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…
In the second half of the 1920s, physicists and mathematicians introduced group theoretic methods into the recently invented ``new'' quantum mechanics. Group representations turned out to be a highly useful tool in spectroscopy and in…
The equivalence of 1 bit of information to entropy was given by Landauer in 1961 as kln2, k the Boltzmann constant. Erasing information implies heat dissipation and the energy of 1 bit would then be (the Landauers limit) kT ln 2, T being…
Since the first experimental realization of Bose-Einstein condensation in cold atomic gases in 1995 there has been a surge of activity in this field. Ingenious experiments have allowed us to probe matter close to zero temperature and reveal…
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…
Does the quantum state represent reality or our knowledge of reality? In making this distinction precise, we are led to a novel classification of hidden variable models of quantum theory. Indeed, representatives of each class can be found…
After G. N. Lewis (1875-1946) proposed the term "photon" in 1926, many physicists adopted it as a more apt name for Einstein's light quantum. However, Lewis' photon was a concept of a very different kind, something few physicists knew or…
The physics of the 20th Century is governed by two pillars, Einstein's relativity principle and the quantum principle. At the beginning of the 21st Century, it becomes clear that there exist the smallest units of matter, such as electrons,…
The theoretical model proposed by Einstein to describe the phononic specific heat of solids as a function of temperature consists the very first application of the concept of energy quantization to describe the physical properties of a real…
In 1907 Einstein discussed with Wilhelm Wien the occurrences of superluminal velocities in dispersive and absorptive media. Einstein tried to present to Wien an expression for the group velocity in dispersive media that was based on his…
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…
We study the back-reaction effects of the finite-temperature scalar field and the photon field in the background of an Einstein universe. In each case we find a relation between the temperature of the universe and its radius. These…
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…
This note is by no means a comprehensive study of Minkowski's space-time formalism of special relativity. The mathematician, Hermann Minkowski was Einstein's former mathematics professor at the Z\"urich Polytechnic. During his studies at…
In summer 1923, a year after his lectures on the `New Foundation of Mathematics' and half a year before the republication of his two notes on the `Foundations of Physics,' Hilbert delivered a trilogy of lectures in Hamburg. In these…
Scientific research is and was at all times a transnational (global) activity. In this respect, it crosses several borders: national, cultural, and ideological. Even in times when physical borders separated the scientific community,…
After recalling episodes from Pascual Jordan's biography including his pivotal role in the shaping of quantum field theory and his much criticized conduct during the NS regime, I draw attention to his presentation of the first phase of…