Related papers: Never bet against Einstein
The Einstein-Rupp experiments have been unduly neglected in the history of quantum mechanics. While this is to be explained by the fact that Emil Rupp was later exposed as a fraud and had fabricated the results, it is not justified, due to…
There have been various claims that the Equivalence Principle, as originally formulated by Einstein, presents several difficulties when extended to the quantum domain, even in the regime of weak gravity. Here we point out that by following…
A recent essay [1] reminds us of how richly Boltzmann deserves to be admiringly commemorated for the originality of his ideas on the occasion of his 150th birthday. Without any doubt, the scientific community owes Boltzmann a great debt of…
People who by training end up dealing with probabilities ("statisticians") roughly fall into one of two camps. One is either a frequentist or a Bayesian. To a scientist, who needs to use probabilities to make sense of the real world, this…
The expansion of the observed universe appears to be accelerating. A simple explanation of this phenomenon is provided by the non-vanishing of the cosmological constant in the Einstein equations. Arguments are commonly presented to the…
In the Patent Office Einstein hatched his most beautiful ideas, and there he spent his "Happy Bern Years". These wonderful ideas led to his miraculous year works of 1905. Einstein was not an expert in academic matters, and he was out of…
In "On the Heavens" Aristotle criticizes the Pythagorean point of view which claims the existence of a cosmic music and a cosmic sound. According to the Pythagorean argument, there exists a cosmic music produced by stars and planets. These…
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",…
Einstein at the Z\"urich Polytechnic: he skipped classes, did not attend all the lectures of his Professors, and before going to the examinations he studied instead from the notebooks of his good friend from class, Marcel Grossmann.…
The 1919 Eclipse Expedition to test the light-bending prediction of General Relativity remains one of the most famous physics experiments of the 20th century. However, in recent decades it has been increasingly often alleged that the…
An out of the box intellectual path exploring the foundations of quantum mechanics is discussed in some detail, in order to clarify why a possibly different way to look at the relevant fundamental questions can be identified and can support…
Heisenberg's uncertainty relation is commonly regarded as defining a level of unpredictability that is fundamentally incompatible with the deterministic laws embodied in classical field theories such as Einstein's general relativity. We…
According to Karl Popper assumptions are statements used to construct theories. During the construction of a theory whether the assumptions are either true or false turn out to be irrelevant in view of the fact that, actually, they gain…
This paper was withdrawn by the author due to an error in the proof of the main result; essentially the parameter R used in the proof may depend on the manifold (M, g), not just on dimension and pinching constant.
Some attack scientific rationality, others defend it, but both miss the point. What both parties take to be scientific rationality is actually a species of irrationality masquerading as scientific rationality. The current orthodox…
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 equations for general relativity, when viewed as a dynamical system for evolving initial data, have a serious flaw: they cannot be proven to be well-posed (except in special coordinates). That is, they do not produce unique…
The Finnish physicist Gunnar Nordstr\"om developed a competing theory of gravitation to Einstein's 1912-1913 gravitation theory. The equivalence principle was valid in his theory and it also satisfied red shift of the spectral lines from…
Honesty has never been scientifically proved to be the best policy in any case. It is pointed out that only honest person can prevent his dishonest partner to bias the outcome of quantum coin tossing.
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…