Related papers: Einstein's Hidden Scaffolding, with a Glance at Po…
With the theory of general relativity, Einstein abolished the interpretation of gravitation as a force and associated it to the curvature of spacetime. Tensorial calculus and differential geometry are the mathematical resources necessary to…
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…
Einstein was deeply puzzled by the success of natural science, and thought that we would never be able to explain it. He came to this conclusion on the ground that we cannot extract the basic laws of physics from experience using induction…
A new formal scheme is presented in which Einstein's classical theory of General Relativity appears as the common, invariant sector of a one-parameter family of different theories. This is achieved by replacing the Poincare` group of the…
Einstein's research manuscripts provide important insights into his exceptional creativity. At the same time, they can present difficulties for a publication in the documentary edition of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (CPAE). 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…
Einstein's theory of Brownian motion is revisited in order to formulate generalized kinetic theory of anomalous diffusion. It is shown that if the assumptions of analyticity and the existence of the second moment of the displacement…
In this work, Einstein's view of geometry as physical geometry is taken into account in the analysis of diverse issues related to the notions of inertial motion and inertial reference frame. Einstein's physical geometry enables a…
Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity was proposed a little over a hundred years back. It remained a bedrock of twentieth century physics right up to Quantum Field Theory. However, the failure over several decades to provide a unified…
This paper provides an algebraic reconstruction of Einstein's own argument for the incompleteness of quantum mechanics -- the one that he thought did not make it into the EPR paper -- in order to clarify the assumptions that underlie an…
Since the appearance of Einstein's paper {\em"On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies"} and the birth of special relativity, it is understood that the theory was basically coded within Maxwell's equations. The celebrated mass-energy…
In summer 1923, a year after his lectures on the `New Foundation of Mathematics' and half a year before the republication of his two notes on the `Foundations of Physics,' Hilbert delivered a trilogy of lectures in Hamburg. In these…
A succinct chronology is given around Nov 1915, when the explicit field equations of General Relativity have been found. Evidence, unearthed by D.Wuensch, that a decisive document of Hilbert has been mutilated in recent years with the…
The 'hole argument'(the English translation of German 'Lochbetrachtung') was formulated by Albert Einstein in 1913 in his search for a relativistic theory of gravitation. The hole argument was deemed to be based on a trivial error of…
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…
The content of Einstein's theory of gravitation is encoded in the properties of the solutions to his field equations. There has been obtained a wealth of information about these solutions in the ninety years the theory has been around. It…
The linear Einstein-Boltzmann equations describe the evolution of perturbations in the universe and its numerical solutions play a central role in cosmology. We revisit this system of differential equations and present a detailed…
Einstein distinguished between ``principle'' and ``constructive'' theories in physics, and although he thought the latter were more explanatory than the former, he regarded his 1905 formulation of special relativity theory as a principle…
We discuss a previously unpublished description of electromagnetism outlined by Richard P. Feynman in the 1960s in five handwritten pages, recently uncovered among his papers, and partly developed in later lectures. Though similar to the…
On November 18, 1915 Einstein reported to the Prussian Academy that the perihelion motion of Mercury is explained by his new General Theory of Relativity: Einstein found approximate solutions to his November 11, 1915 field equations.…