Related papers: Einstein Chases a Light Beam
This note examines an apparently unpublished manuscript on special relativity written by Conrad Habicht in 1914 and made available online by the ETH-Bibliothek Z\"urich in December 2024. To the best of my knowledge, no study of its content…
Einstein's famous 1938 experiment to test relativity of time is plagued by too many ambiguities and does not prove anything. Nevertheless, it is a landmark experiment at the foundation of the modern theory of time perception.
This article is a partly pedagogical, partly historical and partly technical review of special relativity and its experimental foundations, in honor of the centenary of Einstein's annus mirabilis.
I discuss Einstein's path-breaking November 1915 General Relativity papers. I show that Einstein's field equations of November 25, 1915 with an additional term on the right hand side involving the trace of the energy-momentum tensor appear…
Einstein's blackboard is a well-known exhibit at the History of Science Museum at Oxford University. However, it is much less well known that the writing on the board provides a neat summary of a work of historic importance, Einstein's 1931…
In this article, we analyze the third of three papers, in which Einstein presented his quantum theory of the ideal gas of 1924-1925. Although it failed to attract the attention of Einstein's contemporaries and although also today very few…
Einstein distinguished between ``principle'' and ``constructive'' theories in physics, and although he thought the latter were more explanatory than the former, he regarded his 1905 formulation of special relativity theory as a principle…
We present a simple thought experiment in which a beam of light of a finite length (a light-pulse) enters a detection device that consists of a wave detector and a light bulb. We examine the experiment from the reference frame where the…
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.
Retrospectively, in 1905, Special Relativity seemed palpably close; it was "in the air". But apparently it needed the fresh approach of an unprejudiced newcomer, Einstein, to take the final step. I report, in a pedagogical fashion, on the…
The present Editorial introduces the Special Issue dedicated by the journal Universe to the General Theory of Relativity, the beautiful theory of gravitation of Einstein, a century after its birth. It reviews some of its key features in a…
Even Einstein has to be wrong sometimes. However, when Einstein was wrong he created a 70 year debate about the strange behavior of quantum mechanics. His debate helped prove topics such as the indeterminacy of particle states, quantum…
Einstein at the Z\"urich Polytechnic: he skipped classes, did not attend all the lectures of his Professors, and before going to the examinations he studied instead from the notebooks of his good friend from class, Marcel Grossmann.…
We present a basics of the Einstein General Theory of Relativity. In the first part of this review we derive relations of Riemann geometry which are used in the General Relativity. In the second part we discuss Einstein Equations and some…
There are many books on the classical subject of special relativity. However, after having spent a number of years, both in relativistic engineering and research with relativity, I have come to the conclusion that there exist a place for a…
Art history linked some early 20th Century avant-garde visual art movements to contemporary systems of ideas in mathematics and theoretical physics. One of the proposed connections is the one that might have existed between Cubism and…
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…
We present a first English translation and analysis of a little-known review of relativistic cosmology written by Albert Einstein in late 1932. The article, which was published in 1933 in a book of Einstein papers translated into French,…
I provide a very brief sketch of some of Dirac's interests and work in gravity, particularly his Hamiltonian formulation of Einstein's theory and its relation to his earlier research.
In his search for a unified field theory that could undercut quantum mechanics, Einstein considered five dimensional classical Kaluza-Klein theory. He studied this theory most intensively during the years 1938-1943. One of his primary…