10 pages, Published in Spanish in "El universo de Einstein: 1905 - annus mirabilis - 2005", Alejandro Gangui (ed.), Editorial EUDEBA, 2007 (arXiv:0705.4266). Also available at http://www.universoeinstein.com.ar/
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 the history of thought which, together with the Aristotelian and the Newtonian paradigms, embodied the different ways of conceiving the universe and our access to it. The comparison among these three paradigms allows us to understand how the human being has progressively lost his central place in the cosmos, not only in physical terms, but also in an epistemic sense, regarding his power of knowledge about reality.
Albert Einstein accepted a 'special' visiting professorship at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands in February 1920. Although his appointment should have been a mere formality, it took until October of that year before Einstein could occupy his special chair. Why the delay? The explanation involves a case of mistaken identity with Carl Einstein, Dadaist art, and a particular Dutch fear of revolutions. But what revolution was one afraid of? The story of Einstein's Leiden chair throws new light on the reception of relativity and its creator in the Netherlands and in Germany.
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 Zürich Polytechnic. During his studies at the Polytechnic Einstein skipped Minkowski's classes. In 1904 Max Born arrived in the first time to Göttingen. Many years later Born wrote his recollections. In the summer of 1905, Minkowski and Hilbert led an advanced seminar on mathematical physics, on electrodynamical theory. Minkowski told Born later that it came to him as a great shock when Einstein publish…
This paper discusses Einstein's methodology. 1. Einstein characterized his work as a theory of principle and reasoned that beyond kinematics, the 1905 heuristic relativity principle could offer new connections between non-kinematical concepts. 2. Einstein's creativity and inventiveness and process of thinking; invention or discovery. 3. Einstein considered his best friend Michele Besso as a sounding board and his class-mate from the Polytechnic Marcel Grossman, as his active partner. Yet, Einstein wrote to Arnold Sommerfeld that Grossman will never claim to be considered a co-discoverer of the…
In 1922, Albert Einstein visited Paris and interacted extensively with an illustrious section of the French academia. In overfilled sessions at the Collége de France and the Sorbonne, Einstein explained his theories of relativity, and prominent physicists, mathematicians and philosophers listened, debated, questioned and explored facets of relativity. The 1922 visit had its echoes in the life and works of many who participated, particularly decisive for Einstein and the philosopher Henri Bergson. This essay examines that eventful visit, focusing on the physical and logical aspects of Bergson's…
This article reviews the early academic and public reception of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in the Netherlands, particularly after Arthur Eddington's eclipse experiments of 1919. Initially, not much attention was given to relativity, as it did not seem an improvement over Hendrik A. Lorentz' work. This changed after the arrival in Leiden of Paul Ehrenfest. Soon relativity was much studied and lead to controversy among a number of conservative intellectuals, as elsewhere in Europe. The tone of Dutch critics was much more mild, however. This can be understood when one considers Dutch …
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 absolute reference frame which is not acceptable in Einstein's theory. It is possible to avoid this conflict using the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism where two different views can co-exist in harmony. This is not enough to explain Einstein's discovery of the mass-energy relation. The energy-momentum relations for slow and ultra-fast particles take diff…
Einstein's special theory of relativity starts with assumptions about how observations conducted in relatively moving inertial frames must compare. From these assumptions, conclusions can be drawn regarding the laws of physics in any one frame. Can we do the reverse, that is, build the correct physics entirely from considerations within a single frame and infer therefrom the results of measurements in moving frames? Can we, in this project, supply the "elementary foundations" that Einstein found lacking in his own theory, thereby converting special relativity from (in Einstein's terminology) a…
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary since the beginning of the search for gravitational waves at the Max Planck Society, and in coincidence with the 25th anniversary of the foundation of the Albert Einstein Institute, we explore the interplay between the renaissance of general relativity and the advent of relativistic astrophysics following the German early involvement in gravitational-wave research, to the point when gravitational-wave detection became established by the appearance of full-scale detectors and international collaborations. On the background of the spectacular astrophysical…
In glaring contrast to its indisputable century-old experimental success, the ultimate objects and meaning of quantum physics remain a matter of vigorous debate among physicists and philosophers of science. This article attempts to shed new light on the debate. It relies upon two comments by Albert Einstein on his general approach to physical theories. I draw their consequences for the definition of a physical theory's ontology, and next for the ontology of quantum physics - i.e. what it may ultimately be about. The quantum ontology thus derived appears to be strictly limited to evolving exper…
In previous works we have considered various aspects of the reception of the theories of Albert Einstein in our country. In particular, we discussed the impact of his visit to Argentina in 1925, and the precise content of the conferences and scientific publications that Einstein communicated while he was here. We have also discussed, critically, different documents on topics related to the theory of relativity published in the country during the first decades of the last century, in which the technical level was extremely varied. Finally, we have dealt with a forgotten document, which Einstein…
This volume covers one of the most thrilling two-year periods in twentieth-century physics, as matrix mechanics - developed chiefly by W. Heisenberg, M. Born, and P. Jordan - and wave mechanics - developed by E. Schrödinger - supplanted the earlier quantum theory. The almost one hundred writings by Einstein, of which a third have never been published, and the more than thirteen hundred letters show Einstein's immense productivity and hectic pace of life. Einstein quickly grasps the conceptual peculiarities involved in the new quantum mechanics, such as the difference between Schrödinger's wave…
The arrival of Albert Einstein in Argentina in 1925 had an impact, equally relevant, on the scientific community and on the general public. In this paper we discuss that visit from three different perspectives. Firstly, we consider the conditions that allowed for such visit to be possible. Then we focus on the institutional actors that facilitated it, as well as on the expertise and written references on topics related to relativity theory circulating at the time in the local community. In the last section we consider the implications of that visit for the local scientific environment.
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 model of 1917 or the monotonic Einstein-de Sitter model of 1932. The paper offers many insights into the cosmology of Albert Einstein in the light of the first evidence for an expanding universe, and we discuss his views of issues such as the curvature of space, the cosmological constant, the singularity and the timespan of the expansion. We argue that retr…
The recent detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO/VIRGO team is an incredibly impressive achievement of experimental physics. It is also a tremendous success of the theory of General Relativity. It confirms the existence of black holes; shows that binary black holes exist; that they may collide and that during the merging process gravitational waves are produced. These are all predictions of General Relativity theory in its fully nonlinear regime. The existence of gravitational waves was predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 within the framework of linearized Einstein theory. Contrary to …
Intereses convergentes: los años previos a la visita de Einstein a la Argentina en 1925
Universidad de Buenos Aires（布宜诺斯艾利斯大学）；CONICET – Universidad de Buenos Aires, Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio (IAFE)（阿根廷国家科学研究委员会-布宜诺斯艾利斯大学，空间天体物理研究所）
It is well known that, following the emergence of the first evidence for an expanding universe, Albert Einstein banished the cosmological constant term from his cosmology. Indeed, he is reputed to have labelled the term, originally introduced to the field equations of general relativity in 1917 in order to predict a static universe, his "biggest blunder". However serious doubts about this reported statement have been raised in recent years. In this paper, we interrogate the legend of Einstein's "biggest blunder" statement in the context of our recent studies of Einstein's cosmology in his late…
