Related papers: Albert Einstein: His Annus Mirabilis 1905
Albert Einstein visited Spain only once, precisely one hundred years ago. The circumstances, of a very different kind, of this visit will be explained here. In special, some important events happened to Einstein during that period, which,…
Planck's law for black-body radiation marks the origin of quantum theory and is discussed in all introductory (or advanced) courses on this subject. However, the question whether Planck really implied quantisation is debated among…
Modern atomic and nuclear physics took its start in the early part of the twentieth century, to a large extent based upon experimental investigations of radioactive phenomena. Foremost among the pioneers of the new kind of physics was…
Although Einstein's name is closely linked with the celebrated relation E = mc2 between mass and energy, a critical examination of the more than half dozen "proofs" of this relation that Einstein produced over a span of forty years reveals…
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 Equivalence Principle (EP) is not one of the ``universal'' principles of physics (like the Action Principle). It is a heuristic hypothesis which was introduced by Einstein in 1907, and used by him to construct his theory of General…
A hundred years ago, two British expeditions measured the deflection of starlight by the sun's gravitational field, confirming the prediction made by Einstein's General theory of Relativity. One hundred years later many physicists around…
More than a century ago, Albert Einstein presented his general theory of gravitation (GR) to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. One of the predictions of the theory is that not only particles and objects with mass, but also the quanta of…
On the basis of his `Z\"urich Notebook' I shall describe a particularly fruitful phase in Einstein's struggle on the way to general relativity. These research notes are an extremely illuminating source for understanding Einstein's main…
This note is by no means a comprehensive study of Minkowski's space-time formalism of special relativity. The mathematician, Hermann Minkowski was Einstein's former mathematics professor at the Z\"urich Polytechnic. During his studies at…
We present a translation and analysis of a cosmic model published by Einstein in 1931. The paper, which is not widely known, features a model of a universe that undergoes an expansion followed by a contraction, quite different to his static…
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…
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…
A historical overview is given on the basic results which appeared by the year 1926 concerning Einstein's fluctuation formula of black-body radiation, in the context of light-quanta and wave-particle duality. On the basis of the original…
Modern attempts to understand light go back to Newton who considered light to be particles, the so called corpuscular theory, and the other school of Huygens, Young and others. Huygens and Young viewpoint emphasised the wave property. This…
In 1916 Einstein introduced the first rules for a quantum theory of electromagnetic radiation, and he applied them to a model of matter in thermal equilibrium with radiation to derive Planck's black-body formula. Einstein's treatment is…
The cosmological constant was proposed 100 years ago in order to make the model of static Universe, imagined then by most scientists, possible. Today it is the main candidate for the physical essence causing the observed accelerated…
Since its inception, quantum theory has been the subject of fierce interpretive controversy, which persists to this day. Disputed topics include the basic ontology and dynamics of the theory, the role (if any) of measurement, the meaning of…
The information-theoretic point of view proposed by Leibniz in 1686 and developed by algorithmic information theory (AIT) suggests that mathematics and physics are not that different. This will be a first-person account of some doubts and…
Between 1935 and 1936, Einstein was occupied with the Schwarzschild solution and the singularity within it while working in Princeton on the unified field theory and with his assistant Nathan Rosen, on the theory of the Einstein-Rosen…