Related papers: Perspectives on Einstein's scientific works in Mil…
The atomic bomb American program known as Manhattan Project has been studied in detail. Historians argue that the beginning of this program is rooted in the letter Einstein sent to American President Roosevelt in the summer of 1939. This…
In 1926 Emil Rupp published a number of papers on the interference properties of light emitted by canal ray sources. These articles, particularly one paper that came into being in collaboration with Albert Einstein, drew quite some…
We present a translation and analysis of an unpublished manuscript by Albert Einstein in which he attempted to construct a 'steady-state' model of the universe. The manuscript, which appears to have been written in early 1931, demonstrates…
A hundred years ago, two British expeditions measured the deflection of starlight by the sun's gravitational field, confirming the prediction made by Einstein's General theory of Relativity. One hundred years later many physicists around…
Gravitational lensing - the deflection of light rays by gravitating matter - has become a major tool in the armoury of the modern cosmologist. Proposed nearly a hundred years ago as a key feature of Einstein's theory of General Relativity,…
We will follow the growth of gravitational theory in Germany from 1915 to the 1990s, i.e., relativistic theories of gravitation, mainly Einstein's, as a branch of physics in the sense of social, more precisely institutional history. As…
This paper deals with the Physics Institute of via Panisperna in Rome, getting ready for investigation on neutron physics before Fermi's discovery of neutron-induced radioactivity. The importance of nuclear research had been acknowledged in…
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…
During the 1920s and 1930s, Italian physicists established strong relationships with scientists from other European countries and the United States. The career of Bruno Rossi, a leading personality in the study of cosmic rays and an Italian…
Two important and unpleasant events occurred in Albert Einstein's life in 1920: That August an antirelativity rally was held in the large auditorium of the Berlin Philharmonic, and a few weeks later Einstein was drawn into a tense and…
In the Italian education system, secondary students (ages 14-19) are confronted with the foundations of quantum physics during the final term of scientific high school (pre-university year). The Italian Ministry of Education, University and…
The contribution of an astrophysics group based in Milan to the science with the IUE satellite during its almost 20 years lifetime has focussed on high energy sources, of both galactic (LMXRB, HMXRB, and black hole candidates) and…
In this note, we point attention to and briefly discuss a curious manuscript of Einstein, composed in 1938 and entitled "Unified Field Theory," the only such writing, published or unpublished, carrying this title without any further…
In this paper I describe the genesis of Einstein's early work on the problem of motion in general relativity (GR): the question of whether the motion of matter subject to gravity can be derived directly from the Einstein field equations. In…
This document gathers the notes of a 30-hour review course on gravitation, which I delivered in January 2018 and January 2019 at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences of Cameroon (AIMS-Cameroon). Its main goal is to propose a big…
This agile small "book" (in Italian) is an introduction to the life and work of Ettore Majorana, the brightest Italian theoretical physicist of the XX century, regarded by Enrico Fermi as the best theoretician of his time in the world. It…
From an astronomical and relativistic point of view, the Great War began with the August, 1914 capture and imprisonment of the members of a German eclipse expedition that had gone to the Crimea to look, at the request of Einstein, for…
In 2003, Simon Baron-Cohen, a world expert on autism, diagnosed Einstein posthumously with Asperger's syndrome. I think we cannot diagnose a dead person. Historians of science have fiercely objected to this trend of diagnosing deceased…
Contribution to the proceedings of the 1998 Enrico Fermi summer school on Bose-Einstein condensation in Varenna, Italy.
We review here the main contributions of Einstein to the quantum theory. To put them in perspective we first give an account of Physics as it was before him. It is followed by a brief account of the problem of black body radiation which…