Related papers: Gotthold Eisenstein and Philosopher John
A paper of Thomas Young (1773-1829) on the behavior of streams of air makes a good starting point for discussing the not always fair, sometimes serendipitous, association of a physical phenomenon with its discoverer. In a didactic context,…
The concept of fact has a history. Over the past centuries, physicists have appropriated it in various ways. In this article, we compare Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein's interpretations of the concept. Mach, like most nineteenth-century…
In this paper I shall try to sketch some typical aspects of Erich Lehmann's contributions to statistics through his research, his teaching, his service to the profession and his personality.
We discuss a less known aspect of Feynman's multifaceted scientific work, centered about his interest in molecular biology, which came out around 1959 and lasted for several years. After a quick historical reconstruction about the birth of…
We introduce and discuss a nonlinear kinetic equation of Boltzmann type which describes the influence of knowledge in the evolution of wealth in a system of agents which interact through the binary trades introduced in Cordier, Pareschi,…
This article is a multiauthored portrait of Edsger Wybe Dijkstra that consists of testimonials written by several friends, colleagues, and students of his. It provides unique insights into his personality, working style and habits, and his…
The quantum-mechanical description of the world, including human observers, makes substantial use of entanglement. In order to understand this, we need to adopt concepts of truth, probability and time which are unfamiliar in modern…
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…
There are two broad opposing classes of attitudes to reality (realist vs idealist, material vs mental) with corresponding attitudes to knowledge (objective vs subjective, scientific vs romantic). I argue that these attitudes can be…
One of the major developments of twentieth century physics has been the gradual recognition that a common feature of the known fundamental interactions is their gauge structure. In this article the authors review the early history of gauge…
A sketch of some of the fundamental notions related to the nature of knowledge is offered, with special focus on the role of mathematics and my own opinions. No single idea exposed here is entirely original; indeed, this topic has been…
In 1693, Isaac Newton answered a query from Samuel Pepys about a problem involving dice. Newton's analysis is discussed and attention is drawn to an error he made.
This article -- written in honour of Juergen Ehlers -- consists of two different, though interlocking parts: Section 1 describes my 54 years of perpetual experiences and exchanges with him, both science and episodes, whilst section 2…
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…
In this small note I try to summarize some observations about Euclid's remarkable role in mathematics and about the ambient philosophy.
Boltzmann's struggle with a derivation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is sketched. So is his first derivation of the connection between entropy and probability in 1877. Planck's derivation and quantum mechanical modifications of…
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…
The career and accomplishments of Julian Schwinger, who shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1965, have been reviewed in numerous books and articles. For this reason these Memories, which seek to convey a sense of Schwinger's remarkable…
Einstein's unified field theory is extended by the addition of matter terms in the form of a symmetric energy tensor and of two conserved currents. From the field equations and from the conservation identities emerges the picture of a…
Aristotle was the first to declare himself in the class of natural philosophers ({\em physiologoi}) and he was the first physicist because he spelled out the first definitions of some basic physical concepts. Moreover, he was the first…