Related papers: Robert Millikan, Japanese Internment, and Eugenics
We critically revisit Einstein's 1905 heuristic argument for lightquanta, considering its internal coherence and the scope of its applicability. We argue that Einstein's reasoning, often celebrated for its originality, is ambiguous because…
Einstein was in many ways like a detective on a mystery trail, though in his case he was on the trail of nature's mysteries and not some murder mystery! And like all good detectives he had a style. It consisted of taking facts that he knew…
In this paper we continue our study of the scientific research carried out at the Institute of Physics of the National University of La Plata during the first half of the 20th century, and of the important role played by the physicist Ramon…
Lorentz [of the Lorentz transforms and Lorentz contractions fame] contended against Einstein that there had to be a medium in which electro-magnetic waves exist and propagate, and that that would of necessity be an absolute frame of…
Physics was in crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century because the newborn Maxwell's electromagnetism defied mechanistic preconceptions. Albert Einstein understood that the solution to the crisis required an audacious reworking of…
This volume covers one of the most thrilling two-year periods in twentieth-century physics, as matrix mechanics - developed chiefly by W. Heisenberg, M. Born, and P. Jordan - and wave mechanics - developed by E. Schr\"odinger - supplanted…
In this Einstein Year of Physics it seems appropriate to look at an important aspect of Einstein's work that is often down-played: his contribution to the debate on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Contrary to popular opinion, Bohr…
This article reviews the early academic and public reception of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in the Netherlands, particularly after Arthur Eddington's eclipse experiments of 1919. Initially, not much attention was given to…
The Nobel Prize is awarded annually for outstanding scientific discoveries and inventions. Most scientific papers today are co-authored by a large number of researchers. However, very few scientists can receive the Nobel Prize according to…
This paper considers the analogy between the force exerted on cold atoms when they interact with a highly twisted tightly focused laser beam and the forces exerted on a charged dielectric particle inside a uniform electric field when we…
We recount the successful long career of classical physics, from Newton to Einstein, which was based on the philosophy of scientific realism. Special emphasis is given to the changing status and number of ontological entitities and…
The experimental study of gravity became much more active in the late 1950s, a change pronounced enough be termed the birth, or naissance, of experimental gravity physics. I present a review of developments in this subject since 1915,…
The only rational way of educating is to be an example. If one cant help it, a warning example. Albert Einstein. I had the good fortune and privilege of having Michael Fisher as my teacher, supervisor, mentor and friend. During my years as…
The Scientific Revolution sweeping through seventeenth-century Europe led to unprecedented intellectual and scientific insights and high-profile technological developments. Combined with a significant worldwide increase in naval commerce,…
In this little non-technical piece, I argue that some of the lessons that can be learnt from the bold action carried out in 1996 by the physicist Alan Sokal and typically known as the "Sokal affair" not only apply to some sector of the…
Einstein was the first to explore the inertial mass-energy equivalence. In 1905 Einstein showed that a change in energy is associated with a change in inertial mass equal to the change in energy divided by c2. In 1900 Poincar\'e considered…
Background: We present an analysis of interviews with 27 self-identified progressive white-male physics faculty and graduate students discussing race and gender in physics. White men dominate most STEM fields and are particularly…
At the 1927 Solvay conference, Einstein presented a thought experiment intended to demonstrate the incompleteness of the quantum mechanical description of reality. In the following years, the thought experiment was picked up and modified by…
I will argue, pace a great many of my contemporaries, that there's something right about Boltzmann's attempt to ground the second law of thermodynamics in a suitably amended deterministic time-reversal invariant classical dynamics, and that…
Einstein is considered by many as the father of quantum physics in some sense. Yet there is an unshakable view that he was wrong on quantum physics. Although it may be a subject of considerable debate, the core of his allegedly wrong…