Related papers: Albert Einstein: Rebellious Wunderkind
On the basis of his `Z\"urich Notebook' I shall describe a particularly fruitful phase in Einstein's struggle on the way to general relativity. These research notes are an extremely illuminating source for understanding Einstein's main…
In this paper I show that, while Einstein and Bohm both pursued a deterministic description of quantum mechanics, their philosophical concern was in fact primarily realism and not determinism. Their alleged firm adherence to determinism is…
We critically revisit Einstein's 1905 heuristic argument for lightquanta, considering its internal coherence and the scope of its applicability. We argue that Einstein's reasoning, often celebrated for its originality, is ambiguous because…
It is shown as experiments and theories about the nature of light led to the special theory of relativity. The most important facts for the emergence of the theory proposed by Einstein in 1905 are presented.
We outline here the design, execution, and educational outcomes of an intervention inspired by Einstein's elevator thought experiment, intended to introduce secondary school students to the principle of equivalence, which is at the basis of…
Hilbert's paper on ``The Foundations of Physics (First Communication),'' is now primarily known for its parallel publication of essentially the same gravitational field equations of general relativity which Einstein published in a note on…
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 1895 Hendrik Antoon Lorentz derived the Fresnel dragging coefficient in his theory of immobile ether and electrons. This derivation did not explicitly involve electromagnetic theory at all. According to the 1922 Kyoto lecture notes,…
Why is modern physics still today, more than 100 years after its birth, the privilege of an elite of scientists and unknown for the great majority of citizens? The answer is simple, since modern physics is in general not present in the…
In 1917 Einstein published his Cosmological Considerations Concerning the General Theory of Relativity. In it was the first use of the cosmological constant. Shortly thereafter Schr\"odinger presented a note providing a solution to these…
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,…
Einstein's philosophy of physics (as clarified by Fine, Howard, and Held) was predicated on his Trennungsprinzip, a combination of separability and locality, without which he believed objectification, and thereby "physical thought" and…
We present a new algorithm to model and investigate the learning process of a learner mastering a set of grammatical rules from an inconsistent source. The compelling interest of human language acquisition is that the learning succeeds in…
Einstein said that gravity is an acceleration like any other acceleration. But gravity causes relativistic effects at non-relativistic speeds; so gravity could have relativistic origins. And since the strong force is thought to cause most…
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…
The physics that underpins modern technology is based on Einstein's theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Most school students complete their compulsory science education without being taught any of these Einsteinian concepts. Only…
The Einstein Archives contain a considerable collection of calculations in the form of working sheets and scratch paper, documenting Einstein's scientific preoccupations during the last three decades of his life until his death in 1955.…
The objective of this paper is not simply to present an historical overview of Einstein's cosmological considerations, but to discuss the central role they played in shaping the paradigm of relativistic cosmology. This, we'll show, was a…
This article discusses new material, published in Volume 12 of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, that addresses Einstein's knowledge of the Michelson-Morley experiment prior to 1905: in a lecture in Chicago in 1921, Einstein referred…
We recount the successful long career of classical physics, from Newton to Einstein, which was based on the philosophy of scientific realism. Special emphasis is given to the changing status and number of ontological entitities and…