Related papers: Einstein's Patents and Inventions
The life and accomplishments of Grete Hermann are described. During the early twentieth century, she worked in physics, mathematics, philosophy and education. Her most notable accomplishments in physics were in the interpretation of quantum…
Einsteins general theory of relativity is one of the most important accomplishments in the history of science. Its experimental verification a century ago is therefore an essential milestone that is worth celebrating in full. We reassess…
Art history linked some early 20th Century avant-garde visual art movements to contemporary systems of ideas in mathematics and theoretical physics. One of the proposed connections is the one that might have existed between Cubism and…
Einstein is considered by many as the father of quantum physics in some sense. Yet there is an unshakable view that he was wrong on quantum physics. Although it may be a subject of considerable debate, the core of his allegedly wrong…
This article offers a critical engagement with J\"urgen Renn's historiographical approach, with particular focus on "The Evolution of Knowledge" and "The Einsteinian Revolution" (co-authored with Hanoch Gutfreund). It explores how Renn…
Nikola Tesla is often presented by his adepts as the "unjustly forgotten genius", without who our current technology wouldn't exist. In this paper, we analyze some popular statements made by Tesla's adepts, mostly about inventions that they…
Gravity plays an important part in the experiments and discoveries of the modern world. But how was it discovered? Surely Newton and Einstein were not the only people to observe it and account for it. It had been a long path before the full…
The concept of fact has a history. Over the past centuries, physicists have appropriated it in various ways. In this article, we compare Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein's interpretations of the concept. Mach, like most nineteenth-century…
We analyze some of Einstein's failures to accomplish tasks which he posed to himself, notably deterministic interpretation of Quantum mechanics and formulation of the Unified theory of physical interactions, putting them into broader…
Over the years many have written biographies of Einstein. They all based their biographies on primary sources, archival material: memories and letters of people who were in contact with Einstein, Einstein's own recollections; interviews…
The World Year of Physics 2005 celebrates Einstein 1905. Too much celebration of a single character may be hazardous as an example for the younger generation. With such a motto in mind, I comment on some episodes in Einstein's scientific…
Although Einstein's name is closely linked with the celebrated relation E = mc2 between mass and energy, a critical examination of the more than half dozen "proofs" of this relation that Einstein produced over a span of forty years reveals…
This volume covers one of the most thrilling two-year periods in twentieth-century physics, as matrix mechanics - developed chiefly by W. Heisenberg, M. Born, and P. Jordan - and wave mechanics - developed by E. Schr\"odinger - supplanted…
This is an article commissioned by the Spanish Physics Magazine ("Revista Espa\~nola de F\'isica") for the Centennial Anniversary of the discovery of General Relativity. The article reviews experimental and observational efforts to test…
This article presents a brief review of some historical and philosophical aspects of Einstein's 1917 paper 'Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity', a landmark work that denoted the starting point of modern…
It took eight years after Einstein announced the basic physical ideas behind the relativistic gravity theory before the proper mathematical formulation of general relativity was mastered. The efforts of the greatest physicist and of the…
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…
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…
In the post-Maxwellian era, sensing that the tide of discoveries in electromagnetim indicated a decline of the mechanical view, Einstein replaced Newton's three absolutes -- space, time and mass, with a single one, the velocity of light.…
Albert Einstein's practice in physics and his philosophical positions gradually reoriented themselves from more empiricist towards rationalist viewpoints. This change accompanied his turn towards unified field theory and different…