Related papers: Albert Einstein's Methodology
We first see that the inertia of Newtonian mechanics is absolute and troublesome. General relativity can be viewed as Einstein's attempt to remedy, by making inertia relative, to matter---perhaps imperfectly though, as at least a couple of…
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…
A century after its formulation by Einstein, it is time to incorporate special relativity early in the physics curriculum. The approach advocated here employs a simple algebraic extension of vector formalism that generates Minkowski…
This paper constitutes a background to the paper 'Quantum mechanics as "space-time statistical mechanics"?', arXiv:quant-ph/0501133, presented previously by the author. But it is also a free-standing and self-contained paper. The purpose of…
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 review the experimental evidence for Einstein's special and general relativity. A variety of high precision null experiments verify the weak equivalence principle and local Lorentz invariance, while gravitational redshift and other clock…
The intimate relations between Einstein's equation, conformal geometry, geometric asymptotics, and the idea of an isolated system in general relativity have been pointed out by Penrose many years ago. A detailed analysis of the interplay of…
Since its inception, quantum theory has been the subject of fierce interpretive controversy, which persists to this day. Disputed topics include the basic ontology and dynamics of the theory, the role (if any) of measurement, the meaning of…
This paper deals with four topics: The first subject is Abraham's spherical electron, Lorentz's contracted electron and B\"ucherer's electron. The second topic is Einstein's 1905 relativity theory of the motion of an electron. Einstein…
In 1922, Albert Einstein visited Paris and interacted extensively with an illustrious section of the French academia. In overfilled sessions at the Coll\'{e}ge de France and the Sorbonne, Einstein explained his theories of relativity, and…
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…
Arguing from his "hole" thought experiment, Einstein became convinced that, in cases in which the energy-momentum-tensor source vanishes in a spacetime hole, a solution to his general relativistic field equation cannot be uniquely…
Experiments may not reveal their full import at the time that they are performed. The scientists who perform them usually are testing a specific hypothesis and quite often have specific expectations limiting the possible inferences that can…
The confrontation between Einstein's gravitation theory and experimental results, notably binary pulsar data, is summarized and its significance discussed. Experiment and theory agree at the 10^{-3} level. All the basic structures of…
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…
Einstein's revolutionary light quantum hypothesis of 1905 and his further contributions to quantum theory are reviewed.
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…
Writers read Einstein's letter to Mari\'c from 1901 in which he wrote: "bringing our work on relative motion to a successful conclusion!" What came afterwards was boosted by a claim that Joffe had seen the original relativity paper…
The two defining features of the Einsteinian gravity are that it is self interactive as well as it links universally to all particles including zero mass particles. In the process of obtaining the Schwarzshild solution for gravitational…
On his way to General Relativity (GR) Einstein gave several arguments as to why a special relativistic theory of gravity based on a massless scalar field could be ruled out merely on grounds of theoretical considerations. We re-investigate…