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Related papers: The 1905 Relativity Paper and the "Light Quantum"

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I discuss Albert Einstein's 1916 General Theory of Relativity. I show that in Einstein's 1916 review paper, "the Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity", he derived his November 25, 1915 field equations with an additional term on…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2012-01-26 Galina Weinstein

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…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2015-03-30 Norbert Straumann

This note is based on a relatively unknown paper of Albert Einstein published in 1941 in the Revista de la Universidad Nacional de Tucuman. That work can be regarded as the prequel of the one written in 1943 in collaboration with Wolfgang…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2018-07-05 Mariano Galvagno , Gaston Giribet

Planck's introduction of the quantum of action in 1900 was followed by 25 years of trial and error in quest of the understanding of the quantum world; different ideas and directions had to be pursued until the path leading to the elementary…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2016-11-29 Herbert Capellmann

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of Einstein's 1915 landmark paper "Die Feldgleichungen der Gravitation" in which the field equations of general relativity were correctly formulated for the first time, thus rendering general…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2016-02-03 Martin Bucher , Wei-Tou Ni

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…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2013-12-17 Tilman Sauer

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…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2019-07-17 Giulio Peruzzi , Alessio Rocci

Section 7 of Einstein's 1905 electrodynamics paper gives frequency-shift and aberration formulae that together describe an elongated ellipsoidal wavefront. A Lorentz contraction of this ellipsoid solves most (but not all) of the associated…

Physics Education · Physics 2007-05-23 Eric Baird

Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity was proposed a little over a hundred years back. It remained a bedrock of twentieth century physics right up to Quantum Field Theory. However, the failure over several decades to provide a unified…

General Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 B. G. Sidharth

In 1936, Albert Einstein wrote a brief article where he suggested the possibility that a massive object acted as a lens, amplifying the brightness of a star. As time went by, this phenomenon, known as gravitational lensing, has become a…

Popular Physics · Physics 2018-08-01 Jorge Pinochet , Michael Van Sint Jan

This paper examines Schwarzschild's key contributions to general relativity through his two papers. It focuses on his method for developing exterior and interior solutions. The study emphasizes Schwarzschild's ingenious methods and the…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2023-12-05 Galina Weinstein

The Equivalence Principle (EP) is not one of the ``universal'' principles of physics (like the Action Principle). It is a heuristic hypothesis which was introduced by Einstein in 1907, and used by him to construct his theory of General…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2015-06-25 Thibault Damour

There is a myth that Einstein's discovery of general relativity was due to his following beautiful mathematics to discover new insights about nature. I argue that this is an incorrect reading of the history and that what Einstein did was to…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2015-12-24 Lee Smolin

In this paper we review the derivation of light bending obtained before the discovery of General Relativity (GR). It is intended for students learning GR or specialist that will find new lights and connexions on these historic derivations.…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2018-06-11 José-Philippe Pérez , Brahim Lamine

Einstein's biographer Albrecht F\"olsing explained: Einstein presented his field equations on November 25, 1915, but six days earlier, on November 20, Hilbert had derived the identical field equations for which Einstein had been searching…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2014-12-12 Galina Weinstein

It is universally believed that with his 1905 paper "Does the inertia of a body depend on its energy content?" Einstein first demonstrated the equivalence of mass and energy by making use of his special theory of relativity. In the final…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2024-08-19 Tony Rothman

In his 1916 ground-breaking general relativity paper Einstein had imposed a restrictive coordinate condition, his field equations were valid for coordinate systems which are unimodular. Later, Einstein published a paper on gravitational…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2016-02-15 Galina Weinstein

We study the pages in Albert Einstein's 1916 landmark paper in the Annalen der Physik where he derived his field equations for gravity. Einstein made two heuristic and physically insightful steps. The first was to obtain the field equations…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2016-08-23 Sam Walters

Special relativity was discovered at the eve of the century, but finds its roots in the 19th century efforts to understand the optics and electromagnetism of moving bodies. These roots are reviewed in Parts 1 and 2, the latter being…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 J. Reignier

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…

Classical Physics · Physics 2009-02-01 Anders Månsson