Related papers: On thought experiments: Mach and Einstein (Part I)
Einstein's general relativity is increasingly important in contemporary physics on the frontiers of both the very largest distance scales (astrophysics and cosmology) and the very smallest(elementary particle physics). This paper makes the…
This article presents a brief review of some historical and philosophical aspects of Einstein's 1917 paper 'Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity', a landmark work that denoted the starting point of modern…
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.
With his General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein produced a revolution in our conception of reality and of the knowledge we can obtain from it. This revolution can be viewed from philosophy as leading to one of the great paradigms in…
This article presents hitherto unpublished correspondence of Struble in 1947 with Menger, Chandrasekhar, and eventually Einstein, about a possible observational test supporting Einstein's special relativity against Ritz's emission theory…
It is pointed out that recent cosmological findings seem to support the view that the mass/energy distribution of the universe defines the Newtonian inertial frames as originally suggested by Mach. The background concepts of inertial frame,…
We demonstrate that Einstein's general relativity theory arises as a special case in the framework of the Poincar\'e gauge theory of gravity under the assumption of a suitable nonminimal coupling of matter to the Riemann-Cartan geometry of…
This paper examines Lorentz's 1895 derivations of the classical Doppler formula and Fresnel drag, Einstein's 1905 derivation of the relativistic Doppler effect and aberration, and Einstein's 1907 kinematical route to the exact velocity…
The objective of this paper is not simply to present an historical overview of Einstein's cosmological considerations, but to discuss the central role they played in shaping the paradigm of relativistic cosmology. This, we'll show, was a…
We present three natural but distinct formalisations of Einstein's special principle of relativity, and demonstrate the relationships between them. In particular, we prove that they are logically distinct, but that they can be made…
This paper discusses Einstein's methodology. 1. Einstein characterized his work as a theory of principle and reasoned that beyond kinematics, the 1905 heuristic relativity principle could offer new connections between non-kinematical…
From its very beginning, Quantum Theory developed contrary to the intentions of its creators. For Max Planck it marks the failure of a long-term research program, in which he tried to understand the 2nd law of thermodynamics…
This paper constitutes a background to the paper 'Quantum mechanics as "space-time statistical mechanics"?', arXiv:quant-ph/0501133, presented previously by the author. But it is also a free-standing and self-contained paper. The purpose of…
All of the experiments supporting Einstein's Special Relativity Theory are also supportive of the Lorentz ether theory, or many other ether theories. However, a growing number of experiments show deviations from Einstein's Special…
There is a myth that Einstein's discovery of general relativity was due to his following beautiful mathematics to discover new insights about nature. I argue that this is an incorrect reading of the history and that what Einstein did was to…
We review the experimental evidence for Einstein's special and general relativity. A variety of high precision null experiments verify the weak equivalence principle and local Lorentz invariance, while gravitational redshift and other clock…
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…
We briefly review a few aspects of the development of differential geometry which may be considered as being influenced by Einstein's general relativity. We focus on how Einstein's quest for a complete geometrization of matter and…
The Einstein postulates assert an invariance of the propagation speed of light in vacuum for any observer, and which amounts to a presumed absence of any preferred frame. The postulates appear to be directly linked to relativistic effects…
Some highlights of the priority in the discovery of the gravitational field equations are given.