Related papers: Einstein's Approach to Statistical Mechanics: The …
We introduce the special issue on the Statistical Mechanics of Climate published on the Journal of Statistical Physics by presenting an informal discussion of some theoretical aspects of climate dynamics that make it a topic of great…
The Einstein Archives contain a considerable collection of calculations in the form of working sheets and scratch paper, documenting Einstein's scientific preoccupations during the last three decades of his life until his death in 1955.…
In his 1916's first paper on gravitational waves Einstein began to speculate on interactions between the principles of the old quantum theory and his theory of gravitation. With this contribution Einstein has stimulated a lot of similar…
As it is well-known, the year 2005 has been the centenary of the "annus mirabilis" (1905) during which Albert Einstein published four fundamental papers of his. But already in 1979, for the centenary of Einstein's birth, the world…
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…
In 1895 Hendrik Antoon Lorentz derived the Fresnel dragging coefficient in his theory of immobile ether and electrons. This derivation did not explicitly involve electromagnetic theory at all. According to the 1922 Kyoto lecture notes,…
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…
This work assembles some basic theoretical elements on thermal equilibrium, stability conditions, and fluctuation theory in self-gravitating systems illustrated with a few examples. Thermodynamics deals with states that have settled down…
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…
Since the appearance of Einstein's paper {\em"On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies"} and the birth of special relativity, it is understood that the theory was basically coded within Maxwell's equations. The celebrated mass-energy…
With the theory of general relativity, Einstein abolished the interpretation of gravitation as a force and associated it to the curvature of spacetime. Tensorial calculus and differential geometry are the mathematical resources necessary to…
When solving the Einstein's equations for an isolated system of masses, V. Fock introduces harmonic reference frame and obtains an unambiguous solution. Further, he concludes that there exists a harmonic reference frame which is determined…
This note offers an overview of how Josiah Willard Gibbs's Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics, published simultaneously in London and New York in 1902, spread through European university libraries. Contrary to the received idea…
An unified thermodynamical framework based in the use of a generalized Massieu-Planck thermodynamic potential is proposed and a new formulation of Boltzmann-Gibbs Statistical Mechanics is established. Under this philosophy a generalization…
Recent developments in observational cosmology have led to attempts to make modifications on both sides of the Einstein equation to explain some of the puzzling new findings. What follows is an examination of the source of gravity that we…
We consider random walk among iid, uniformly elliptic conductances on $\mathbb Z^d$, and prove the Einstein relation (see Theorem 1). It says that the derivative of the velocity of a biased walk as a function of the bias equals the…
Thermodynamic fluctuation theory originated with Einstein who inverted the relation $S=k_B\ln\Omega$ to express the number of states in terms of entropy: $\Omega= \exp(S/k_B)$. The theory's Gaussian approximation is discussed in most…
I give a highly selective overview of the way statistical mechanics explains the microscopic origins of the time asymmetric evolution of macroscopic systems towards equilibrium and of first order phase transitions in equilibrium. These…
We present a translation of the 1933 paper by R. F\"urth in which a profound analogy between quantum fluctuations and Brownian motion is pointed out. This paper opened in some sense the way to the stochastic methods of quantization…
The Einstein relation, relating the steady state fluctuation properties to the linear response to a perturbation, is considered for steady states of stochastic models with a finite state space. We show how an Einstein relation always holds…