Related papers: How Hilbert has found the Einstein equations befor…
The first three sections of this article contain a broad brush summary of the profound changes in the notion of time in fundamental physics that were brought about by three revolutions: the foundations of mechanics distilled by Newton in…
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…
A historical account of Einstein's 'Fernparallelismus' approach towards a unified field theory of gravitation and electromagnetism is given. In this theory, a space-time characterized by a curvature-free connection in conjunction with a…
There exists some confusion, as evidenced in the literature, regarding the nature of the gravitational field in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. It is argued here the this confusion is a result of a change in interpretation of the…
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…
Referring to the behavior of accelerating objects in special relativity, and applying the principle of equivalence, one expects that the coordinate acceleration of point masses under gravity will be velocity dependent. Then, using the…
About 50 years ago, in 1958, Dirac published his formulation of generalized Hamiltonian dynamics for gravitation. Several years later Arnowitt, Deser and Misner (ADM) proposed their description of the dynamics of General Relativity which…
It is shown that the well-known triviality of the Einstein field equations in two dimensions is not a sufficient condition for the Einstein-Hilbert action to be a total divergence, if the general covariance is to be preserved, that is, a…
The field equations of general relativity can be derived from the Einstein action, which is quadratic in connection coefficients, rather than the standard action involving the Gibbons-Hawking-York term and counterterm. We show that it is…
General relativity can be formulated either as in its original geometrical version (Einstein, 1915) or as a field theory (Feynman, 1962). In the Feynman presentation of Einstein theory an hypothesis concerning the interaction of gravity to…
We explore the different meanings of "quantum uncertainty" contained in Heisenberg's seminal paper from 1927, and also some of the precise definitions that were explored later. We recount the controversy about "Anschaulichkeit",…
Special relativity was discovered at the eve of the century, but finds its roots in the 19th century efforts to understand the optics and electromagnetism of moving bodies. These roots are reviewed in Parts 1 and 2, the latter being…
Hilbert's first problem is of importance in relation to work being done in computational systems. It is the question of equipollence of natural and real numbers. By construction equipollence is established for real numbers in open interval…
A generalization of General Relativity is studied. The standard Einstein-Hilbert action is considered in the Palatini formalism, where the connection and the metric are independent variables, and the connection is not symmetric. As a result…
In this paper, we examine the relationship between general relativity and the theory of Einstein algebras. We show that according to a formal criterion for theoretical equivalence recently proposed by Halvorson (2012, 2015) and Weatherall…
In July 1925 Heisenberg published a paper [Z. Phys. 33, 879-893 (1925)] which ended the period of `the Old Quantum Theory' and ushered in the new era of Quantum Mechanics. This epoch-making paper is generally regarded as being difficult to…
Einstein based his special theory of relativity on two postulates: (a) physical laws appear the same in all inertial frames, and (b) the speed of light in vacuum is an observer-independent constant. However, it is already known that the…
An alternative approach to Einstein's theory of General Relativity (GR) is reviewed, which is motivated by a range of serious theoretical issues inflicting the theory, such as the cosmological constant problem, presence of non-Machian…
This paper deals with four topics: The first subject is Abraham's spherical electron, Lorentz's contracted electron and B\"ucherer's electron. The second topic is Einstein's 1905 relativity theory of the motion of an electron. Einstein…
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…