Related papers: Gotthold Eisenstein and Philosopher John
The history of intellectuals consists of a complicated web of influences and interconnections of philosophers, scientists, writers, their work, and ideas. How did these influences evolve over time? Who were the most influential scholars in…
Gravity plays an important part in the experiments and discoveries of the modern world. But how was it discovered? Surely Newton and Einstein were not the only people to observe it and account for it. It had been a long path before the full…
Classical statistical mechanics of macroscopic systems in equilibrium is based on Boltzmann's principle. Tsallis has proposed a generalization of Boltzmann-Gibbs statistics. Its relation to dynamics and nonextensivity of statistical systems…
Randomness is an unavoidable notion in discussing quantum physics, and this may trigger the curiosity to know more of its cultural history. This text is an invitation to explore the position on the matter of Thomas Aquinas, one of the most…
This is a write-up of introductory remarks that I made at the UIC conference in honor of Lawrence Ein's 60th birthday. It presents an informal survey of some of Ein's work, interspersed with stories and reminiscences.
In his interviews with Eckermann in the 1820s, Goethe referred to his Theory of Colors as his greatest and ultimate achievement. Its reception following publication in 1810 and subsequent reviews throughout the history of physical science…
I present some reminiscences, both personal and scientific, over a lifetime of admiration of, and friendship with, one of the Grandmasters of our subject.
Incomputability as a mathematical notion arose from work of Alan Turing and Alonzo Church in the 1930s. Like Turing himself, it attracted less attention than it deserved beyond the confines of mathematics. Today our experiences in computer…
In 1910 Einstein published a crucial aspect of his understanding of Boltzmann entropy. He essentially argued that the likelihood function of any system composed by two probabilistically independent subsystems {\it ought} to be factorizable…
My personal recollections are presented regarding my interactions with Steven Weinberg and the impact he had in my career from when I was his graduate student until the present.
Henry Eyring was, and still is, a towering figure in science. Some aspects of his life and science, beginning in Mexico and continuing in Arizona, California, Wisconsin, Germany, Princeton, and finally Utah, are reviewed here. Eyring moved…
For several decades a portrait of Johannes Kepler has been widely circulating among professional astronomers, scientific and academic institutions, and the general public. Despite its provenance and identification having been questioned in…
We analyze Einstein's recoiling slit experiment and point out that the inevitable entanglement between the particle and the recoiling-slit was not part of Bohr's reply. We show that if this entanglement is taken into account, one can…
The aim of this article is twofold. First, we shall review and analyse the Neo-Kantian justification for the application of probabilistic concepts in physics that was defended by Hans Reichenbach early in his career, notably in his…
We explore the different meanings of "quantum uncertainty" contained in Heisenberg's seminal paper from 1927, and also some of the precise definitions that were explored later. We recount the controversy about "Anschaulichkeit",…
At the time it celebrates one century of existence, general relativity---Einstein's theory for gravitation---is given a companion theory: the so-called teleparallel gravity, or teleparallelism for short. This new theory is fully equivalent…
Art history linked some early 20th Century avant-garde visual art movements to contemporary systems of ideas in mathematics and theoretical physics. One of the proposed connections is the one that might have existed between Cubism and…
In spite of the wide range of his book, Cournot did not know some essential discoveries in natural sciences (William Herschel, Daniel Bernoulli, Humboldt) and his deliberations about measurement were almost useless. But he introduced the…
Einstein's philosophy of physics (as clarified by Fine, Howard, and Held) was predicated on his Trennungsprinzip, a combination of separability and locality, without which he believed objectification, and thereby "physical thought" and…
In his Autobiographical Notes, Einstein mentioned that on his road to the final theory of general relativity it was a major difficulty to accustom himself to the idea that coordinates need not possess an immediate physical meaning in terms…