Related papers: Die Erste Stunde (The first hour)
In this short paper a new thought experiment has been introduced to illustrate the famous Heisenberg's uncertainty principle based on Otto-Wiener's experiment (1890) associated with standing light waves. This illustration is quite easy as…
Einstein, in his "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Korper", gave a physical (operational) meaning to "time" of a remote event in describing "motion" by introducing the concept of "synchronous stationary clocks located at different places". But…
Perception, sensation and re-action are central questions both in Psychology, Arts, Neurology and Physics. Some hundred years ago, believed to start with Wertheimer, researchers and artists tried to classify our human being "understanding"…
In the early 1980s, Schwinger made seminal contributions to the semiclassical theory of atoms. There had, of course, been earlier attempts at improving upon the Thomas--Fermi model of the 1920s. Yet, a consistent derivation of the leading…
This note is by no means a comprehensive study of Minkowski's space-time formalism of special relativity. The mathematician, Hermann Minkowski was Einstein's former mathematics professor at the Z\"urich Polytechnic. During his studies at…
This is a free summary of a much longer article published in german in "Forschung Frankfurt". This article presents facts concerning the works of Max Dehn and the history of Frankfurt University. E. Hellinger, R. Moufang, C. L. Siegel, A.…
The onset and the development of the concept of exchange force in quantum physics are historically reconstructed, starting from Heisenberg's seminal contributions in 1926 and going through the great developments in nuclear physics, which…
This Introduction opens the book {\sl Standing Together in Troubled Times} which presents a story of friendship between Wolfgang Pauli, one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the 20th century, and Charlotte Houtermans. They met at…
In loop quantum cosmology, Friedmann-LeMaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) space-times arise as well-defined approximations to specific \emph{quantum} geometries. We initiate the development of a quantum theory of test scalar fields on these…
We retrace the first steps towards understanding neutrinos, particles predicted by Pauli in 1930 to avoid a supposed violation of time-translation symmetry. Despite the tendency to reduce the whole story to his intuition and the skill of…
A first-order formulation of gravity is developed in which the fundamental fields consist of an SL(2,C) connection and two spinor-valued 1-forms. It is shown that the first term of an expansion of the Einstein-Hilbert action leads to an…
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…
The physics that underpins modern technology is based on Einstein's theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Most school students complete their compulsory science education without being taught any of these Einsteinian concepts. Only…
I discuss Albert Einstein's 1914 review paper, "The Formal Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity" from two points of view: the main elements in the paper that appear to have led to the downfall of the Einstein-Grossman theory; and…
The GRANIT project is the follow-up of the pioneering experiments that first observed the quantum states of neutrons trapped in the earth's gravitational field at the Institute Laue Langevin (ILL). Due to the weakness of the gravitational…
The question about the appearance of time in the semiclassical limit of quantum gravity continues to be discussed in the literature. It is believed that a temporal Schrodinger equation for matter fields on the background of a classical…
Eugene Wigner famously argued for the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" for describing physics and other natural sciences in his 1960 essay. That essay has now led to some 55 years of (sometimes anguished) soul searching ---…
These lecture notes recall the conceptual developments which led from the discovery of the neutron to our present understanding of strong interaction physics.
We study influence of gravitational field on the mass-energy equivalence relation by incorporating gravitation in the physical situation considered by Einstein (Ann. Physik, 17, 1905, English translation in ref. [1]) for his first…
Scalar fields have had a long and controversial life in gravity theories, having progressed through many deaths and resurrections. The first scientific gravity theory, Newton's, was that of a scalar potential field, so it was natural for…