Related papers: Einstein's Patents and Inventions
In his Autobiographical Notes, Einstein mentioned that on his road to the final theory of general relativity it was a major difficulty to accustom himself to the idea that coordinates need not possess an immediate physical meaning in terms…
Einstein's contributions to statistical mechanics and quantum theory are reviewed. We also provide a detailed discussion of his thesis on suspensions that led to a good value of the Avogadro number.
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 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…
The cosmological constant was proposed 100 years ago in order to make the model of static Universe, imagined then by most scientists, possible. Today it is the main candidate for the physical essence causing the observed accelerated…
Philosophers have spilled much ink over the discovery of ideas in the classical 'context of discovery'. However, there has been little engagement with the question of what constitutes a discovery of 'things in the world'. A much-overlooked…
In Europe (e.g., in Italy), and in the States, the opinion is widely spreading that the negative consequences of modern progress are the fault of "Science". A lively debate on this topic took place among the famous writer Leonardo Sciascia…
Einstein identified singularities in spacetimes, such as at the Schwarzschild radius, where later relativists only find a coordinate system assigning multiple values to a single spacetime event. These differing judgments derive from…
The Einstein-Rupp experiments were proposed in 1926 by Albert Einstein to study the wave versus particle nature of light. Einstein presented a theoretical analysis of these experiments to the Berlin Academy together with results of Emil…
In the year 1905 Albert Einstein published four papers that raised him to a giant in the history of science of all times. These works encompass the photon hypothesis (for which he obtained the Nobel prize in 1921), his first two papers on…
In 1936, Albert Einstein wrote a brief article where he suggested the possibility that a massive object acted as a lens, amplifying the brightness of a star. As time went by, this phenomenon, known as gravitational lensing, has become a…
While Special and General Relativity are well known by a very large number of people, Einstein's religious convinctions are almost ignored. The paper focuses on what was his view about immortality. Einstein believed in Spinoza's view of God…
The evolution of the methods used to find solutions of Einstein's field equations during the last 100 years is described. Early papers used assumptions on the coordinate forms of the metrics. Since the 1950s more invariant methods have been…
In 1905 Einstein presented the Clock Paradox and in 1911 Paul Langevin expanded Einstein's result to human observers, the "Twin Paradox." I will explain the crucial difference between Einstein and Langevin. Einstein did not present the…
Some highlights of the priority in the discovery of the gravitational field equations are given.
Einstein's contribution to relativity is reviewed. It is pointed out that Weyl gave first unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism and it was different than the five dimensional theory of Kaluza. Einstein began his work on…
The Milanese period in Albert Einstein's life is a key one for the understanding of the development of his scientific questioning. While being a student in Z\"urich from 1896, Einstein returned regularly to Milan to meet his family for the…
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…
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…
Einstein's research manuscripts provide important insights into his exceptional creativity. At the same time, they can present difficulties for a publication in the documentary edition of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (CPAE). The…