Related papers: In search of Einstein's brain
It has for ages been a rather constant feature of thinking in science to take it for granted that the respective thinking happens in realms which are totally outside and independent of all the other phenomena that constitute the objects of…
The acceleration of the cosmic expansion is a fundamental challenge to standard models of particle physics and cosmology. The new physics of dark energy may lie in the nature of gravity, the quantum vacuum, or extra dimensions. I give a…
The confrontation between General Relativity and experimental results, notably binary pulsar data, is summarized and its significance discussed. The agreement between experiment and theory is numerically very impressive. However, some…
This paper provides a systematic response to the criticisms raised by Jean-Marc Ginoux in response to my review of his book on the history of relativity. Whereas my review was written in a strictly academic manner, Ginoux's commentary…
Exploring the Universe is one of the great unifying themes of humanity. Part of this endeavour is the search for extraterrestrial life. But how likely is it that we will find life, or that if we do it will be similar to ourselves? And…
The article is an historical overview of some of the major contributions from different areas of Science with which, for centuries, it has been built up a scientific, sound and consistent vision of the atom. Some experiments that led us to…
This work analyzes the difficulties in learning and teaching Einstein's theory of special relativity. An extensive bibliographic review has been performed, considering articles published in the most relevant journals on science education,…
This essay discusses the idea that a Theory of Everything would not be complete without a theory of consciousness as one of its parts, and the suggestion that new physics may be needed to describe consciousness. I argue that the motivations…
The recent discovery that Einstein once attempted - and quickly abandoned - a steady-state model of the expanding universe sheds new light on his philosophical journey from static to dynamic cosmologies.
An often-overlooked characteristic of the human mind is its propensity to wander. Despite growing interest in the science of mind-wandering, most studies operationalize mind-wandering by its task-unrelated contents, which may be orthogonal…
The two defining features of the Einsteinian gravity are that it is self interactive as well as it links universally to all particles including zero mass particles. In the process of obtaining the Schwarzshild solution for gravitational…
The Einstein universe is the conformal compactification of Minkowski space. It also arises as the ideal boundary of anti-de Sitter space. The purpose of this article is to develop the synthetic geometry of the Einstein universe in terms of…
This essay gives a very general introduction to Schwarzschild black holes. First, it focuses on some of its classical features as solutions to Einstein's theory of gravity. In the second part it discusses briefly some specific quantum…
This paper critically examines the central thesis of Kieran Fox's "I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein"-namely, that Einstein's intellectual development constitutes a coherent spiritual path culminating in a…
A brief personal perspective is given of issues, questions, formulations, methods, some answers and selected extensions posed by the spin glass problem, showing how considerations of an apparently insignificant and practically unimportant…
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…
The human brain is the substrate for human intelligence. By simulating the human brain, artificial intelligence builds computational models that have learning capabilities and perform intelligent tasks approaching the human level. Deep…
We begin this chapter with the bold claim that it provides a neuroscientific explanation of the magic of creativity. Creativity presents a formidable challenge for neuroscience. Neuroscience generally involves studying what happens in the…
We consider a search for phenomenological signatures from an hypothetical space-time granularity that respects Lorentz invariance. The model is based on the idea that the metric description of Einstein's gravity corresponds to a…
Einstein's contributions to statistical mechanics and quantum theory are reviewed. We also provide a detailed discussion of his thesis on suspensions that led to a good value of the Avogadro number.