相关论文: 100 Years of Brownian motion

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of Einstein's 1915 landmark paper "Die Feldgleichungen der Gravitation" in which the field equations of general relativity were correctly formulated for the first time, thus rendering general…

Boltzmann's struggle with a derivation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is sketched. So is his first derivation of the connection between entropy and probability in 1877. Planck's derivation and quantum mechanical modifications of…

In this paper we review the derivation of light bending obtained before the discovery of General Relativity (GR). It is intended for students learning GR or specialist that will find new lights and connexions on these historic derivations.…

In the first paper of this series, I investigated whether a wavefunction model of a heavy particle and a collection of light particles might generate "Brownian-Motion-Like" trajectories of the heavy particle. I concluded that it was…

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…

In 1907 Einstein discussed with Wilhelm Wien the occurrences of superluminal velocities in dispersive and absorptive media. Einstein tried to present to Wien an expression for the group velocity in dispersive media that was based on his…

In 1923 Louis de Broglie (1892-1987) discovered the material waves and six years later received the Nobel price for this discovery. Apart these well known facts this French physicist nevertheless seems to be forgotten. Details of his life…

Einstein's contribution to relativity is reviewed. It is pointed out that Weyl gave first unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism and it was different than the five dimensional theory of Kaluza. Einstein began his work on…

Long before the general theory of relativity was finally formulated in 1916, arguments based entirely on Einstein's equivalence principle predicted the well known phenomenon of the gravitational red shift. Precisely the same arguments are…

The idea of atoms is old but X-rays provided the first probe into the physical atom. Photographs of X-ray scattering from crystals -Laue spots- were the first visual proof for the physical existence of atoms arranged in a perfect geometric…

In 1930 Einstein argued against consistency of the time-energy uncertainty relation by discussing a thought experiment involving a measurement of mass of the box which emitted a photon. Bohr seemingly triumphed over Einstein by arguing that…

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…

As we mark the centenary of Albert Einstein's seminal contribution to both quantum mechanics and special relativity, we approach another anniversary--that of Einstein's foundation of the quantum theory of solids. But 100 years on, the same…

After G. N. Lewis (1875-1946) proposed the term "photon" in 1926, many physicists adopted it as a more apt name for Einstein's light quantum. However, Lewis' photon was a concept of a very different kind, something few physicists knew or…

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…

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 biggest and most lasting among David Bohm's (1917-1992) many achievements is to have proposed a picture of reality that explains the empirical rules of quantum mechanics. This picture, known as pilot wave theory or Bohmian mechanics…

We present a translation of Albert Einstein's Rio de Janeiro manuscript on light quanta. In it, Einstein evaluates the Bohr-Kramers-Slater refutation of light quanta, which was concurrently the subject of intense empirical scrutiny on two…

In 1910 Einstein published a crucial aspect of his understanding of Boltzmann entropy. He essentially argued that the likelihood function of any system composed by two probabilistically independent subsystems {\it ought} to be factorizable…

In two respects Ludwig Boltzmann was a pioneer of quantum mechanics. First because in his statistical interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics he introduced the theory of probability into a fundamental law of physics and thus…