Related papers: On the origin of Special Relativity
Section 7 of Einstein's 1905 electrodynamics paper gives frequency-shift and aberration formulae that together describe an elongated ellipsoidal wavefront. A Lorentz contraction of this ellipsoid solves most (but not all) of the associated…
In this article, we present several apparent paradoxes of special relativity and their respective solutions. These paradoxes have appeared since the advent of relativity in 1905, and in fact they are never paradoxes. From a didactic point…
With his General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein produced a revolution in our conception of reality and of the knowledge we can obtain from it. This revolution can be viewed from philosophy as leading to one of the great paradigms in…
Evaluation of the additive constants in the space-time Lorentz transformation equations required, according to Einstein, to correctly describe synchronised clocks at different spatial locations, reveals the spurious and unphysical nature of…
It is known that Einstein's conceptual base for his theory of relativity was the philosophy formulated by Immanuel Kant. Things appear differently to observers in different frames. However, Kant's Ding-an-Sich leads to the existence of the…
Gunnar Nordstrom constructed the first relativistic theory of gravitation formulated in terms of interactions with a scalar field. It was an important precursor to Einstein's general theory of relativity a couple of years later. He was also…
All of the experiments supporting Einstein's Special Relativity Theory are also supportive of the Lorentz ether theory, or many other ether theories. However, a growing number of experiments show deviations from Einstein's Special…
This paper has pedagogical motivation. It is not uncommon that students have great difficulty in accepting the new concepts of standard special relativity, since these seem contrary to common sense. Experience shows that geometrical or…
Special relativity beyond its basic treatment can be inaccessible, in particular because introductory physics courses typically view special relativity as decontextualized from the rest of physics. We seek to place special relativity back…
Heisenberg's breakthrough in his July 1925 paper that set in motion the development of Quantum Mechanics through subsequent papers by Born, Jordan, Heisenberg and also Dirac (from 1925 to 1927) is reexamined through a modern lens. In this…
We review here the main contributions of Einstein to the quantum theory. To put them in perspective we first give an account of Physics as it was before him. It is followed by a brief account of the problem of black body radiation which…
Starting with Einstein's famous papers of 1905, we review some of the ensuing developments and their impact on present-day physics. We attempt to cover topics that are of interest to historians and philosophers of science as well as to…
Simply by assuming the first postulate of Special Relativity and by exploring Gedankenexperiments with electromagnetic forces, we suggest that there is a speed limit in the universe, which can be determined as a relation between vacuum…
We give a critical analysis of the conceptual foundations of special relativity. We formulate a simple operational criterion for distinguishing between noninertial and inertial frames which is introduced prior to geometry. We associate the…
In the year 1905 Albert Einstein published four papers that raised him to a giant in the history of science of all times. These works encompass the photon hypothesis (for which he obtained the Nobel prize in 1921), his first two papers on…
This is a review with some comments on the A. Einstein`s 1911 paper, which he published as one of his many attempts of the general theory of relativity. The main point of the idea is to propose a new approach about light and its motion as…
The nature of gravity is fundamental to understand the scaffolding of the Universe and its evolution. Einstein's general theory of relativity has been scrutinized for over ninety five years and shown to describe accurately all phenomena…
Einstein's genius and penetrating physical intuition led to the general theory of relativity, which incorporates gravity into the geometry of spacetime. However, the theory of general relativity leads to perspectives which go far beyond the…
Five topics: A rigid body does not exist in the special theory of relativity; distant simultaneity defined with respect to a given frame of reference without any reference to synchronized clocks; challenges on Einstein's connection of…
The goal of this lecture is to introduce the student to the theory of Special Relativity. Not to overload the content with mathematics, the author will stick to the simplest cases; in particular only reference frames using Cartesian…