Related papers: Albert Einstein's Methodology
Over the years many have written biographies of Einstein. They all based their biographies on primary sources, archival material: memories and letters of people who were in contact with Einstein, Einstein's own recollections; interviews…
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…
This note is devoted to a detail concerning the work of Albert Einstein and Peter Bergmann on unified theories of electromagnetism and gravitation in five dimensions. In their paper of 1938, Einstein and Bergmann were among the first to…
Einstein's general relativity is the best available theory of gravity. In recent years, spectacular proofs of Einstein's theory have been conducted, which have aroused interest that goes far beyond the narrow circle of specialists. The aim…
This article reviews the biography of the Swiss mathematician Marcel Grossmann (1878-1936) and his contributions to the emergence of the general theory of relativity. The first part is his biography, while the second part reviews his…
A historical account of Einstein's 'Fernparallelismus' approach towards a unified field theory of gravitation and electromagnetism is given. In this theory, a space-time characterized by a curvature-free connection in conjunction with a…
We summarize the papers published by Einstein in the Annalen der Physik in the years 1902-04 on the derivation of the properties of thermal equilibrium on the basis of the mechanical equations of motion and of the calculus of probabilities.…
In a comparison of the principles of special relativity and of quantum mechanics, the former theory is marked by its relative economy and apparent explanatory simplicity. A number of theorists have thus been led to search for a small number…
We present a historical review of Einstein's 1917 paper 'Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity' to mark the centenary of a key work that set the foundations of modern cosmology. We find that the paper followed as a…
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…
Einstein's happiest thought was his leap from the observation that a falling person feels no gravity to the realization that gravity might be equivalent to acceleration. It affects all bodies in the same way because it is a property of…
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.…
In 1927 Einstein sent two brief communications to the Prussian Academy of Sciences on Kaluza's five-dimensional theory. In his Einstein biography, Abraham Pais asserted that he could not understand the reasons that pushed Einstein to…
Einstein's distinction between principle theories and constructive theories is methodological rather than metaphysical. Principle theories such as thermodynamics and relativity articulate empirically distilled constraints that delimit…
In this paper, we discuss the role of Mathematics in articulating reality in theoretical Physics. We propose a parallel between empirical and theoretical work and investigate how scientists can also speak about reality without performing…
In 1905 the well-known physicist Max Planck was coeditor of the Annalen der Physik, and he accepted Einstein's paper on light quanta for publication, even though he disliked the idea of "light quanta". Einstein's relativity paper was…
The Einstein postulates assert an invariance of the propagation speed of light in vacuum for any observer, and which amounts to a presumed absence of any preferred frame. The postulates appear to be directly linked to relativistic effects…
Times magazine selected Albert Einstein, the German born Jewish Scientist as the person of the 20th century. Undoubtedly, 20th century was the age of science and Einstein's contributions in unraveling mysteries of nature was unparalleled.…
It is a little known fact that while he was developing his theory of general relativity, Einstein's initial idea was a variable speed of light theory. Indeed space-time curvature can be mimicked by a speed of light $c(r)$ that depends on…
Einstein's special theory of relativity starts with assumptions about how observations conducted in relatively moving inertial frames must compare. From these assumptions, conclusions can be drawn regarding the laws of physics in any one…