Related papers: On the first Solvay Congress in 1911
This paper explores the historical development of the theory of quantum mechanics between 1900 and 1927 by chronological examination of the foundational papers and ideas. Beginning with Planck's introduction of energy quantisation in…
We present a conceptually clear introduction to quantum theory, deriving the theory from scratch from the point of view of quantum information. Different subsets of these lectures were taught to a wide variety of audiences, including…
Einstein's early calculations of gravitational lensing, contained in a scratch notebook and dated to the spring of 1912, are reexamined. A hitherto unknown letter by Einstein suggests that he entertained the idea of explaining the…
This article presents a brief review of some historical and philosophical aspects of Einstein's 1917 paper 'Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity', a landmark work that denoted the starting point of modern…
We present a translation of Albert Einstein's Rio de Janeiro manuscript on light quanta. In it, Einstein evaluates the Bohr-Kramers-Slater refutation of light quanta, which was concurrently the subject of intense empirical scrutiny on two…
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…
In 1926 Emil Rupp published a number of papers on the interference properties of light emitted by canal ray sources. These articles, particularly one paper that came into being in collaboration with Albert Einstein, drew quite some…
Einstein's first mention of the uniformly rotating disk in print was in 1912, in his paper dealing with the static gravitational fields. After the 1912 paper, the rotating disk problem occurred in Einstein's writings only in a 1916 review…
On November 12, 1802, Thomas Young lays down in front of the Royal Society of London his Theory of Light and Colours. In this text, he defends a vibratory model or light, in which the peculiar attention he gives to the consequence of the…
Some important topics from history of neutrino physics over the last fifty years are discussed. History of neutrinos is older, at 4th December 2010 it will be eightieth anniversary of the "neutrino birth". In that day W. Pauli wrote the…
Th\'eophile De Donder, a Belgian mathematician born in Brussels, elaborated two important ideas that created a bridge between thermodynamics and chemical kinetics. He invented the concept of the degree of advancement of a reaction, and, in…
Though the majority of physicists would probably not support preemptive wars, nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction would not exist without their contributions. Einstein's anti-militaristic position has been well-documented and the…
In 1943 fear that the German war machine might use atomic bombs was abating and among physicists another fear was taking its place - that of a postwar nuclear arms race with worldwide proliferation of nuclear weapons. Manhattan Project…
In 1924, Satyendra Nath Bose dispatched a manuscript introducing the concept now known as Bose statistics to Albert Einstein. Bose could hardly have imagined that the exotic statistics of certain emergent particles of quantum matter would…
On January 4, 2012, the centenary of Henri Poincar\'e's death, a colloquium was held in Nancy, France the subject of which was "Vers une biographie d'Henri Poincar\'e". Scholars discussed several approaches for writing a biography of…
The transition from the quantum to the classical world and its relation to Bose-Einstein condensation and superfluidity is explained in ten equations.
Albert Einstein postulated the equivalence of energy and mass, developed the theory of special relativity, explained the photoelectric effect, and described Brownian motion in five papers, all published in 1905, 100 years ago. With these…
In this paper, I comment on a recent paper by Michel Janssen and J\"urgen Renn. In his published paper of November 18, 1915, Einstein presented a solution to the problem of the perihelion motion of Mercury and obtained the correct result of…
In the history of physics 1905 can be considered as the year of Einstein's proclamation of independence of events. Indeed the concept of independent events occupies a essential place in the three main 1905 Einstein's papers (quanta of…
The origin of quantum physics was the discovery of the base unit of electromagnetic action $h$ by Max Planck in 1900 when he analyzed the experimental results of the black body radiation. This permitted Albert Einstein a few years later to…