Related papers: Albert Einstein and the Marangoni family
The article traces the way Einstein formulated the relation between energy and mass in his work from 1905 to 1955. Einstein emphasized quite often that the mass $m$ of a body is equivalent to its rest energy $E_0$. At the same time he…
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…
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…
The preprint is an English translation of the paper by famous astrophysicist Samuil Kaplan (1921-1978) "O krugovykh orbitakh v teorii tyagoteniya Einsteina (On circular orbits in Einstein's theory of gravitation)", published in 1949 in the…
The history of the Arcetri Institute of Physics at the University of Florence is analyzed from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1960s. Thanks to the arrival of Garbasso in 1913, not only did the Institute gain new premises on…
It is shown as experiments and theories about the nature of light led to the special theory of relativity. The most important facts for the emergence of the theory proposed by Einstein in 1905 are presented.
This talk is dedicated to Alberto Sirlin in celebration of his seventieth birthday. I wish to convey my deep appreciation of his many important contributions to particle physics over 40 years and look forward to many more years of…
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.
Among the geniuses of mankind, Einstein was probably one of those who made more erroneous claims, and often changed his opinion during the years on important scientific subjects. However, it is important to bear in mind that his mistakes…
To study the propagation of light in nebulae, many astrophysicists use a Monte-Carlo computation which does not take interferences into account. Replacing the wrong method by Einstein coefficients theory gives, on an example, a theoretical…
The main purpose of the present paper is to show that a correction of one mistake was crucial for Einstein's pathway to the first version of the 1915 general theory of relativity, but also might have played a role in obtaining the final…
Einstein's 1932 efforts of persuasion to renounce the cosmological constant and his possible influence on Robertson.
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.…
A paradox associated with the astrophysical Poynting-Robertson effect is presented. The paradox arises when relativity theory and Mie's solution of Maxwell's equations are confronted with the statements on the Poynting-Robertson effect.…
In these shorts notes I want to remembermy relationship with GianCarlo Ghirardi, who was my supervisor in my Master Degree in Physics at the University of Trieste and then he became a very deep and close friend. I don't want to describe in…
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…
At the end of the 19th century light was regarded as an electromagnetic wave propagating in a material medium called ether. The speed c appearing in Maxwell's wave equations was the speed of light with respect to the ether. Therefore,…
Albert Einstein made fundamental contributions to the development of quantum mechanics. However, he was never satisfied with the quantum worldview. In fact, during most of his life he attempted to find inconsistencies and paradoxes within…
In 1924, Einstein received a short manuscript in the mail from the Indian physicist S.N. Bose. He quickly translated Bose's manuscript to German and submitted it to Zeitschrift f\"ur Physik. Within a few weeks, Einstein presented his own…
I discuss Einstein's path-breaking November 1915 General Relativity papers. I show that Einstein's field equations of November 25, 1915 with an additional term on the right hand side involving the trace of the energy-momentum tensor appear…