Related papers: Einstein's Miraculous Year
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…
Experimental verification of the theoretical predictions made by Albert Einstein in his paper, published in 1905, on the molecular mechanisms of Brownian motion established the existence of atoms. In the last 100 years discoveries of many…
Two of the major achievements of Stephen Hawking are described in elementary terms. They are his work on the beginning of the universe and his work on the end of black holes. These are perhaps the scientific achievements for which he is…
As we approach the centenary of the discovery of quantum statistics in 1924, it is important to revisit Bose's original derivation of Planck's law usually ignored in most standard presentations of Bose-Einstein statistics. It introduced not…
The content of Einstein's theory of gravitation is encoded in the properties of the solutions to his field equations. There has been obtained a wealth of information about these solutions in the ninety years the theory has been around. It…
The intermediate stage of the development of general relativity is inseparable of Marcel Grossmann's mathematical assistance. Einstein acknowledges Grossmann's help during 1912-1914 to the development of general relativity. In fact, as with…
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…
Although implicit in the discovery of the Schwarzschild solution 40 years earlier, the issues raised by the theory of what are now known as black holes were so unsettling to physicists of Einstein's generation that the subject remained in a…
The Jarzynski equality (JE) is a remarkable statement relating transient irreversible processes to infinite-time free energy differences. Although twenty years old, the JE remains unfamiliar to many; nevertheless it is a robust and powerful…
Einstein wrote memorably that `The eternally incomprehensible thing about the world is its comprehensibility.' This paper argues that the universe must be comprehensible at some level for information gathering and utilizing subsystems such…
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…
We show that the transformation of relativistic velocities derived without using the Lorentz-Einstein transformation for the space-time coordinates of the same event and the fact that we can define the proper value of length, time interval,…
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…
A hundred years ago, the quantum concept provoked a revolution in science and the search of a new conceptual basis for whole physics, as emphasized by Einstein. In this paper, I discuss the essential features of Planck's works in 1900 on…
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…
Einstein's general relativity is increasingly important in contemporary physics on the frontiers of both the very largest distance scales (astrophysics and cosmology) and the very smallest(elementary particle physics). This paper makes the…
In 1924, Einstein received a short manuscript in the mail from the Indian physicist S.N. Bose. He quickly translated Bose's manuscript to German and submitted it to Zeitschrift f\"ur Physik. Within a few weeks, Einstein presented his own…
At the end of the 19th century light was regarded as an electromagnetic wave propagating in a material medium called ether. The speed c appearing in Maxwell's wave equations was the speed of light with respect to the ether. Therefore,…
This year we are celebrating 101 years since the discovery of cosmic rays. They are whizzing all around the Universe, and they occur at very different energies, including the highest particle energies that exist. However, theory predicts an…
There is an increasing recognition regarding of the importance of introducing modern Einsteinian concepts early in science education. This study investigates the efficacy of an innovative educational programme "Einstein-First", which…