Related papers: Einstein's Patents and Inventions
Aristotle was the first to declare himself in the class of natural philosophers ({\em physiologoi}) and he was the first physicist because he spelled out the first definitions of some basic physical concepts. Moreover, he was the first…
It is commonly known that the steady-state model of the universe was proposed and championed in a series of influential papers around mid-twenty century by Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi, and Thomas Gold. In contrast it is little known that,…
We comment on the paper [1] by Albert Einstein from 1918 to Willem De Sitter's solution [2] of the Einstein field equation from today's point of view. To this end, we start by describing the geometry of the De Sitter space-time and present…
Einstein's theory of general relativity models the physical universe using spacetimes which satisfy Einstein's gravitational field equations. To date, Einstein's theory has been enormously successful in modeling observed gravitational…
Einstein wrote memorably that `The eternally incomprehensible thing about the world is its comprehensibility.' This paper argues that the universe must be comprehensible at some level for information gathering and utilizing subsystems such…
This article reviews the biography of the Swiss mathematician Marcel Grossmann (1878-1936) and his contributions to the emergence of the general theory of relativity. The first part is his biography, while the second part reviews his…
Al-Biruni (973-1048) was one of the greatest scientists of all times. He was an astronomer, mathematician and philosopher, and studied physics and natural sciences. In this paper, we will discuss some of his experimental methods and some…
The nature of gravity is fundamental to understand the scaffolding of the Universe and its evolution. Einstein's general theory of relativity has been scrutinized for over ninety five years and shown to describe accurately all phenomena…
Are symmetries discovered or rather invented by humans ? The stand you may take firmly here reveals a lot of your epistemological position. Conversely, the arguments you may forge for answering to this question, or to one of its numerous…
This is a brief look at how Einstein explored formal symmetries between quantized matter and quantized radiation between 1903 and 1925. Specifically he employed thermodynamic comparisons between the ideal molecular gas and the photon gas.…
In 1905 the well-known physicist Max Planck was coeditor of the Annalen der Physik, and he accepted Einstein's paper on light quanta for publication, even though he disliked the idea of "light quanta". Einstein's relativity paper was…
This paper will attempt to show that the Doppler principle was of major relevance to Einstein for the genesis of the special theory of relativity.
This note is devoted to a detail concerning the work of Albert Einstein and Peter Bergmann on unified theories of electromagnetism and gravitation in five dimensions. In their paper of 1938, Einstein and Bergmann were among the first to…
What, if any, was Einstein's biggest mistake, the one most affecting our physics today? There is a perhaps apocryphal story, recounted by George Gamow, that he counted his cosmological constant as his biggest blunder. We now know his…
I provide a very brief sketch of some of Dirac's interests and work in gravity, particularly his Hamiltonian formulation of Einstein's theory and its relation to his earlier research.
Isaac Newton, in popular imagination the Ur-scientist, was an outstanding humanist scholar. His researches on, among others, ancient philosophy, are thorough and appear to be connected to and fit within his larger philosophical and…
This article is a summary of a talk about Richard Feynman, given at a conference Polymaths across the Eras organized in November 2023 by the St Cross Centre for the History and Philosophy of Physics (HAPP) in Oxford. It describes Feynman as…
At the 1927 Solvay conference, Einstein presented a thought experiment intended to demonstrate the incompleteness of the quantum mechanical description of reality. In the following years, the thought experiment was picked up and modified by…
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…
Einstein established the theory of general relativity and the corresponding field equation in 1915 and its vacuum solutions were obtained by Schwarzschild and Kerr for, respectively, static and rotating black holes, in 1916 and 1963,…