Related papers: Einstein and the Quantum
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…
Heisenberg introduced his famous uncertainty relations in a seminal 1927 paper entitled "The Physical Content of Quantum Kinematics and Mechanics". He motivated his arguments with a gedanken experiment, a gamma ray microscope to measure the…
The notion of Einstein causality, i.e. the limiting role of the velocity of light in the transmission of signals, is discussed. It is pointed out that Nimtz and coworkers use the notion of signal velocity in a different sense from Einstein…
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…
At the 1927 Solvay conference, Einstein presented a thought experiment intended to demonstrate the incompleteness of the quantum mechanical description of reality. In the following years, the thought experiment was picked up and modified by…
K. G\"odel [G1] discovered his celebrated solution to Einstein equations in 1949. Additional contributions were made by Kundt [K] and Hawking-Ellis ([H-E],5.7). On the other hand, a general Lorentz invariant operator, associated to the…
We study the pages in Albert Einstein's 1916 landmark paper in the Annalen der Physik where he derived his field equations for gravity. Einstein made two heuristic and physically insightful steps. The first was to obtain the field equations…
Albert Einstein's journey to formulate the theory of general relativity involved significant shifts in his approach to gravitational field equations. Starting in 1912, he collaborated with Marcel Grossmann and initially explored broadly…
Between 1905 and 1907, Einstein first tried to extend the special theory of relativity in such a way so as to explain gravitational phenomena. This was the most natural and simplest path to be taken. These investigations did not fit in with…
The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the earliest work of L\'eon Rosenfeld, one of the pioneers in the search of Quantum Gravity, the supposed theory unifying quantum theory and general relativity. We describe how and why Rosenfeld…
Satyendra Nath Bose is one of the great Indian scientists. His remarkable work on the black body radiation or derivation of Planck's law led to quantum statistics, in particular, the statistics of photon. Albert Einstein applied Bose's idea…
In his 1916 ground-breaking general relativity paper Einstein had imposed a restrictive coordinate condition, his field equations were valid for coordinate systems which are unimodular. Later, Einstein published a paper on gravitational…
In this paper, we discuss the role of Mathematics in articulating reality in theoretical Physics. We propose a parallel between empirical and theoretical work and investigate how scientists can also speak about reality without performing…
It is a little known fact that while he was developing his theory of general relativity, Einstein's initial idea was a variable speed of light theory. Indeed space-time curvature can be mimicked by a speed of light $c(r)$ that depends on…
A complete history of early atomic models would fill volumes, but a reasonably coherent tale of the path from mechanical atoms to the quantum can be told by focusing on the relevant work of three great contributors to atomic physics, in the…
We summarize the papers published by Einstein in the Annalen der Physik in the years 1902-04 on the derivation of the properties of thermal equilibrium on the basis of the mechanical equations of motion and of the calculus of probabilities.…
Einstein, in his "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Korper", gave a physical (operational) meaning to "time" of a remote event in describing "motion" by introducing the concept of "synchronous stationary clocks located at different places". But…
The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been discussed since this theme first was brought up by Einstein and Bohr. This article describes a proposal for a new foundation of quantum theory, partly drawing upon ideas from statistical…
Einstein's kinetic theory of the Brownian motion, based upon light water molecules continuously bombarding a heavy pollen, provided an explanation of diffusion from the Newtonian mechanics. Since the discovery of quantum mechanics it has…
After some brief biographical notes, Wolfgang Pauli's main contributions to general relativity, quantum theory, quantum field theory, and elementary particle physics are reviewed. A detailed description is given how Pauli descovered -…