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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…
Equal opportunity is central to the concept of meritocracy. Opportunity and leadership should go to the people most qualified by performance, and not on the basis of arbitrary or irrelevant attributes. This principle is arguably most…
In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) claimed the incompleteness of quantum mechanics based on the notions of realism (``{\it If, without in any way disrupting a system, we can predict with certainty - i.e., with a probability of one…
This paper concerns the ethics and morality of algorithms and computational systems, and has been circulating internally at Facebook for the past couple years. The paper reviews many Nobel laureates' work, as well as the work of other…
The renaissance of General Relativity witnessed considerable progress regarding both understanding and justifying Einstein's equations. Both general relativists and historians of the subject tend to share a view, General Relativity…
We examine evaluations of the contributions of Matrix Mechanics and Max Born to the formulation of quantum mechanics from Heisenberg's Helgoland paper of 1925 to Born's Nobel Prize of 1954. We point out that the process of evaluation is…
Two important and unpleasant events occurred in Albert Einstein's life in 1920: That August an antirelativity rally was held in the large auditorium of the Berlin Philharmonic, and a few weeks later Einstein was drawn into a tense and…
The notion that we live in an evolving universe was established only in the twentieth century with the discovery of the recession of galaxies by Hubble and with the Lemaitre and Friedmann's interpretation in the 1920s. However, the concept…
In 1932 Ettore Majorana published an article proving that relativity allows any value for the spin of a quantum particle and that there is no privilege for the half integer spin. The Majorana idea was so innovative for the time that the…
Einstein's sink is a well-known object among physics and astronomy students at Leiden University. Stories about its origin have been passed down since it was moved to the large lecture room of the then newly built Oort Building in 1998.…
I argue that European schools of thought on memory and memorization were critical in enabling the growth of the scientific method. After giving a historical overview of the development of the memory arts from ancient Greece through 17th…
Edwin Powel Hubble is regarded as one of the most important astronomers of 20th century. In despite of his great contributions to the field of astronomy, he never received the Nobel Prize because astronomy was not considered as the field of…
We study a mechanical system that was considered by Boltzmann in 1868 in the context of the derivation of the canonical and microcanonical ensembles. This system was introduced as an example of ergodic dynamics, which was central to…
"I have dealt with many different transformations with various periods of time, but the quickest that I have met was my own transformation in one moment from a physicist to a chemist." Ernest Rutherford (Nobel Banquet, 1908) This article is…
The recently published book, ``Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age'', by Patricia Rife (Boston: Birkh\"{a}user, 1999) is reviewed in an essay for the lay audience. Meitner was a leading nuclear physicist at the time that the…
The double slit experiment is iconic and widely used in classrooms to demonstrate the fundamental mystery of quantum physics. The puzzling feature is that the probability of an electron arriving at the detector when both slits are open is…
This article examines the case of two papers published in Naturwissenschaften by the physicist Max Planck that were retrospectively marked as retracted on Springer digital platform. Rather than originating in scientific fraud, these…
Joseph Polchinski (1954-2018), one of the the leading theoretical physicists of the past 50 years, was an exceptionally broad and deep thinker. He made fundamental contributions to quantum field theory, advancing the role of the…
In 1935, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen ('EPR') reported on a thought experiment that they believed showed that quantum theory provided an incomplete description of reality. Today we know that quantum theory is a complete…
As we mark the centenary of Albert Einstein's seminal contribution to both quantum mechanics and special relativity, we approach another anniversary--that of Einstein's foundation of the quantum theory of solids. But 100 years on, the same…