Related papers: Robert Millikan, Japanese Internment, and Eugenics
It is commonly known that the steady-state model of the universe was proposed and championed in a series of influential papers around mid-twenty century by Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi, and Thomas Gold. In contrast it is little known that,…
Keith Brueckner was a theoretical physicist of considerable technical power who came of age as the mysteries of the atomic nucleus were coming into focus. His fundamental contributions to the "many-body problem" had a lasting impact on our…
Western thinking underwent a turning point between 1885 and 1925. Einstein in 1905 symbolizes the emblematic hinge of this change of direction. To find an equivalent phenomenon in the past we need to go back to the period from the XV…
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…
The long standing contrast between Boltzmann's and Gibbs' approach to statistical thermodynamics has been recently rekindled by Dunkel and Hilbert [1], who criticize the notion of negative absolute temperature (NAT), as a misleading…
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…
Dealing with Eugene Wigner's ideas on the measurement procedure in quantum physics and unearthing the controversy that pitted him against supporters of the interpretation of complementarity, I will show how Wigner and his followers…
With each passing year, the young Albert Einstein's achievements in physics in the year 1905 seem to be ever more miraculous. We describe why the centenary of this remarkable year is worthy of celebration.
The Manhattan Project was one of the largest scientific collaborations ever undertaken. It operated thanks to a complex social network of extraordinary minds and it became undoubtedly one of the most remarkable intellectual efforts of human…
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the revolutionary contributions to physics by Einstein, I am happy to respond to a problem posed by him in 1905. He said: In this paper it will be shown that according to the…
One of the most public episodes of gatekeeping in modern science was the case of so-called 'cold fusion'. At a news conference in 1989 the electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced that they had found evidence of nuclear…
In their well-known argument against the completeness of quantum theory, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) made use of a state that strictly correlates the positions and momenta of two particles. We prove the existence and uniqueness of…
Einstein's happiest thought was his leap from the observation that a falling person feels no gravity to the realization that gravity might be equivalent to acceleration. It affects all bodies in the same way because it is a property of…
Experiments may not reveal their full import at the time that they are performed. The scientists who perform them usually are testing a specific hypothesis and quite often have specific expectations limiting the possible inferences that can…
Throughout history, a relatively small number of individuals have made a profound and lasting impact on science and society. Despite long-standing, multi-disciplinary interests in understanding careers of elite scientists, there have been…
Kantian philosophy of space, time and gravity is significantly affected in three ways by particle physics. First, particle physics deflects Schlick's General Relativity-based critique of synthetic a priori knowledge. Schlick argued that…
Back in 1964, the theoretical physicists Francois Englert and Robert Brout, as well as Peter Higgs, suggested an explanation for the fact that most elementary particles - such as the electron - have a mass. This scenario predicted a new…
Physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard P. Feynman once remarked ``We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality,…
The availability of a number of databases, in particular the Science Citation Index (SCI), have encouraged the development and use of bibliometric techniques to analyze and evaluate the production and impact of scientists. To avoid pitfalls…
In recent centuries the world has become increasingly dominated by empirical evidence and theoretic science in developing worldviews. Advances in science have dictated Roman Catholic doctrine such as the acceptance of Darwinian evolution…