Related papers: Perspectives on Einstein's scientific works in Mil…
With each passing year, the young Albert Einstein's achievements in physics in the year 1905 seem to be ever more miraculous. We describe why the centenary of this remarkable year is worthy of celebration.
The first direct experimental test of Einstein's theory of general relativity involved a pair of expeditions to measure the bending of light at a total solar eclipse that took place one hundred years ago, on 29 May 1919. So famous is this…
In previous works we have considered various aspects of the reception of the theories of Albert Einstein in our country. In particular, we discussed the impact of his visit to Argentina in 1925, and the precise content of the conferences…
We present a first English translation and analysis of a little-known review of relativistic cosmology written by Albert Einstein in late 1932. The article, which was published in 1933 in a book of Einstein papers translated into French,…
In recent centuries the world has become increasingly dominated by empirical evidence and theoretic science in developing worldviews. Advances in science have dictated Roman Catholic doctrine such as the acceptance of Darwinian evolution…
This paper reconstructs the derivations underlying the kinematical part of Einstein's 1905 special relativity paper, emphasizing their operational clarity and minimalist use of mathematics. Einstein employed modest tools-algebraic…
Einstein's sink is a well-known object among physics and astronomy students at Leiden University. Stories about its origin have been passed down since it was moved to the large lecture room of the then newly built Oort Building in 1998.…
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…
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…
This article reviews the early academic and public reception of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in the Netherlands, particularly after Arthur Eddington's eclipse experiments of 1919. Initially, not much attention was given to…
The concepts of primary and reciprocal experiments and base and travelling frames in special relativity are concisely described and applied to several different space-time experiments. These include Einstein's train/embankment thought…
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…
In this contribution I discuss a peak in Einstein's endeavor to extract as much information as possible about the nature of radiation from the Planck distribution is his paper "On the Quantum Theory of Radiation" of 1916. This is one of the…
In this article, we discuss the idea of gravitational lensing, from a systematic, historical and didactic point of view. We show how the basic lensing equation together with the concepts of geometrical optics opens a space of implications…
Einstein's theoretical analysis of mass-energy equivalence, already, at the time, experimentally evident in radioactive decays, in two papers published in 1905, as well as Planck's introduction, in 1906, of the concepts of relativistic…
Einstein is usually revered as the father of special and general relativity. In this article I demonstrate that he is also the father of Solid State Physics, or even his broader version known as Condensed Matter Physics (including liquids).…
We present a translation of Albert Einstein's Rio de Janeiro manuscript on light quanta. In it, Einstein evaluates the Bohr-Kramers-Slater refutation of light quanta, which was concurrently the subject of intense empirical scrutiny on two…
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…
The first time one of us (G.P.) encountered Earle was in Summer 1966, when she was directed to study Earle's papers on radiative corrections to quasi-elastic electron scattering. The suggestion had come from Bruno Touschek, at the time head…
Physics was in crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century because the newborn Maxwell's electromagnetism defied mechanistic preconceptions. Albert Einstein understood that the solution to the crisis required an audacious reworking of…