Related papers: Historical and Philosophical Aspects of the Einste…

At present, there is practically no doubt that general relativity is closely related to gravity. Moreover, after the work of Jacobson, Padmanabhan and others, it became clear that a thermodynamic interpretation of Einstein's relativistic…

Neither the world nor science came to an end when the gunfire stopped on 11 November 1918 (close to 11 AM in some time zone), but neither would ever be the same again. Part I of this inquiry (Observatory 138, 46-58, April 2018) looked at…

While purely philosophical in the early times, and still very speculative at the beginning of the twentieth century, Cosmology has gradually entered into the realm of experimental science over the past eighty years. It has raised some…

Einstein presented the Hole Argument against General Covariance, understood as invariance with respect to a change of coordinates, as a consequence of his initial failure to obtain covariant equations that, in the weak static limit, contain…

Einstein's famous 1938 experiment to test relativity of time is plagued by too many ambiguities and does not prove anything. Nevertheless, it is a landmark experiment at the foundation of the modern theory of time perception.

Spacetime curvature plays the primary role in general relativity but Einstein later considered a theory where torsion was the central quantity. Just as the Einstein-Hilbert action in the Ricci curvature scalar R can be generalized to f(R)…

We review here the main contributions of Einstein to the quantum theory. To put them in perspective we first give an account of Physics as it was before him. It is followed by a brief account of the problem of black body radiation which…

We are at a specific period of modern cosmology, during which the large increase of the amount of data leads to the idea that the determination of cosmological parameters has been achieved with a rather good precision. There is a large…

Starting with Einstein's famous papers of 1905, we review some of the ensuing developments and their impact on present-day physics. We attempt to cover topics that are of interest to historians and philosophers of science as well as to…

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…

We suggest that not only quanta may have played a role in Einstein's ideas on relativity, but that they themselves may be related to the dynamical and relativistic behaviour of the electromagnetic field exhibited in a Poincar\'e's 1900…

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…

One century after its formulation, Einstein's general relativity has made remarkable predictions and turned out to be compatible with all experimental tests. Most of these tests probe the theory in the weak-field regime, and there are…

Giving up Einstein's assumption, implicit in his 1916 field equations, that inertial mass, even in its appearance as energy, is equivalent to active gravitational mass and therefore is a source of gravity allows revising the field equations…

In a comparison of the principles of special relativity and of quantum mechanics, the former theory is marked by its relative economy and apparent explanatory simplicity. A number of theorists have thus been led to search for a small number…

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…

The Hilbert-Einstein equations are insufficient to describe the geometry of the Universe, as they only constrain a local geometrical property: curvature. A global knowledge of the geometry of space, if possible, would require measurement of…

The accelerating expansion of the Universe poses a major challenge to our understanding of fundamental physics. One promising avenue is to modify general relativity and obtain a new description of the gravitational force. Because…

The cosmological constant and its phenomenology remain among the greatest puzzles in theoretical physics. We review how modifications of Einstein's general relativity could alleviate the different problems associated with it that result…

On November 18, 1915 Einstein reported to the Prussian Academy that the perihelion motion of Mercury is explained by his new General Theory of Relativity: Einstein found approximate solutions to his November 11, 1915 field equations.…