# Questions tagged [einstein]

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was one of the most important physicists of all time. His work touched many major areas of physics, although he is mostly known as the creator of the theory of relativity and the photoelectric effect. Use this tag for questions about Einstein's scientific life.

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### What was the poetic duel Einstein had with Lilly Rona about?

Felix Ehrenhaft was married to Lilly Rona. Einstein and Ehrenhaft regularly met and discussed about magnetic poles or fractional charges. Einstein didn't agree and used his authority to keep Ehrenhaft ...
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### Where there scientists before Einstein who viewed space(time) as being elastic?

Einstein was the first who saw spacetime as a mallable substance to be malled with mass. As far as I know there were no people who suggested such a view of spacetime before him. But I could be wrong. ...
58 views

### Is there any literature or articles which expand more on Einstein's thoughts about Dostoyevsky's novels?

It is a well known fact that he admired Dostoyevsky even more than scientists. I'm looking for things like, Einstein's opinions about his religious discourse? What did he think of his bold statements ...
33 views

### How did Mach's view on spacetime differ from Einstein's?

We can read in Wikipedia: Mach's principle, in cosmology, hypothesis that the inertial forces experienced by a body in nonuniform motion are determined by the quantity and distribution of matter in ...
72 views

### Was Einstein motivated by Riemannian geometry, or did he merely use it?

Einstein made intensive use of non-Eucliden geometry already developed by mathematicians. The difference being that the real manifolds (well, one of them) as imagined by the mathematicians were ...
201 views

### Why did the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics got the upperhand?

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is nowadays the interpretation that prevails over other interpretations (or theories). Basically, it states that all processes in Nature are ...
38 views

### Why can't it be said that Lorentz invented Special Relativity? [duplicate]

It is well known that Lorenz found the transformations of space and time to account for the observations made by Michelson and Morley. Before their experiments, an absolute aether was supposed to ...
85 views

### Is there any evidence that Einstein knew of Cliffords speculation on the nature of gravity and electromagnetism?

Around 1870, William Clifford published a short note in The Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society describing all forces as an aspect of the curvature of space. This is the basis of ...
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### How did Einstein arrive at the result that mass and energy affect pairs of points in spacetime (the curves joining them)?

I understand that the relationship between the metric tensor* and the four-momentum flux across the surfaces of constant $x^\nu$ coordinate is described by Einstein's field equations. My question is &...
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### Did Einstein know about Laplace's query into whether gravity is instantaneous?

Here it states, In 1776, Laplace published a memoir in which he first explored the possible influences of a purported luminiferous ether or of a law of gravitation that did not act instantaneously. ...
79 views

### What is the difference between Einstein's and Boltzmann's definitions of probability?

In the Einstein's 1905 paper on light quanta, he wrote the following about Boltzmann's notion of probability: The word probability is used in a sense that does not confirm to its definition as it ...
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### What did Einstein mean by "continual flight from wonder"?

Rothenberg A. Flight from Wonder: An Investigation of Scientific Creativity. Oxford University Press; 2014. https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199988792.001.0001/...
7k views

### Why did no one else, except Einstein, work on developing General Relativity between 1905-1915?

Einstein dedicated his time between 1905-1915 to develop general relativity (GR). It seems strange to me that no other physicists attempted to tackle this problem in this ten-year period. After all, ...
79 views

### When were white holes theorised?

It seems to me that once black holes were theorised then the obvious singularity at its centre - though only ratified after Hawking and Penrose's singularity theorems - one would have to ask where the ...
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### Does "Einstein's Light clock" really belong to Einstein?

Although I cannot find the related Q/A, I remember that someone here notified me that the so-called Einstein's light clock was first introduced by Max von Laue or someone but Einstein. Does anybody ...
103 views

### Einstein's handwritten manuscript on General Relativity

The book "The Road to Relativity" by Gutfreund and Renn annotates Einstein's original handwritten manuscript from 1916 - "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity." I can ...
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### How did the "Wheel of Theodorus" become known as the "Wheel of Einstein"?

I've desperately searched the Internet, to no avail, to find a citation of how the "Wheel of Theodorus" became known as the "Wheel of Einstein" as claimed by Wikipedia and Wolfram.
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### Einstein: 'SR is a theory of invariants, not relativity' -- source?

It is occasionally remarked that Einstein was unhappy that SR became referred to as a ‘theory of relativity’, when in his eyes it was, much more importantly, a theory of invariants (Invariantentheorie)...
254 views

### Einstein visited former teacher/professor who thought he wanted to borrow money: who might that have been?

I am not sure in what bio I read this but it was not a new bio -- not Isaacson, for example. The anecdote was simply that he wanted to see an old professor/teacher (as many of us I think might do if ...
257 views

### Did Einstein oppose evolution? [closed]

According to the laws of nature progression is always downward. One of these laws is the Second Law of Thermodynamics which says that isolated systems cannot increase in complexity. For example, a ...
931 views

### What is the source of Einstein's quote "spooky action at a distance"? [duplicate]

Einstein's attribution of 'spooky action at a distance' to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is obviously in wide use as a quote. However, I've been googling the issue for a while and ...
87 views

### Understanding Bohr's response to a 1930 Einstein thought experiment that challenged the uncertainty principle

Structure of this post I want to better understand how Bohr responded to Einstein's 1930 attempt to demonstrate that quantum mechanics was inherently contradictory under the Copenhagen interpretation....
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### Were there doubts that Voigt's time dilation was correct rather than Einstein's?

According to Wikipedia's Voigt transformation: Lorentz did not adopt this transformation, as he found in 1904 that only the Lorentz contraction corresponds to the principle of relativity. Since ...
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### Did Einstein or the scientific community know about quantum tunneling during the EPR debates?

It is my understanding that Einstein produced the EPR paper to necessarily elucidate the existence of physical properties that could not exist prior to measurement. That was his assumption which was ...
259 views

### First paper introducing the concept of four-vectors

I'm trying to find the first paper in which the concept of four-vectors was introduced. I read "Principle of Relativity" by H. Minkowski but he only presents the notion of metric and invariant space-...
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### What is the original source for Einstein's description of entanglement as "Spooky Action at a Distance"?

Try as I may, I cannot find the original source where Einstein described entanglement as "Spooky Action at the Distance." The work "spooky" is not in the 1935 EPR paper, which was written in English ...
147 views

### Einstein praising Sophus Lie

p. 153 of Raúl M. Falcón Ganfornina and Juan Núñez Valdés, “Mathematical Foundations of Santilli Isotopies,” trans. Alan Aversa, Algebras, Groups, and Geometries 32 (2015): 135–308. quotes (but does ...
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### What was the relationship between Einstein and Minkowski?

I read many Einstein's Biographies, but Minkowski was never mentioned, though his discovery of the union of space and time created the basis for GR. Minkowski was Einstein's teacher of mathematics ...
241 views

### Where did Einstein propose interpreting the square of amplitude as probability density (Born's rule)?

In Max Born's Nobel lecture, he alludes to Einstein's proposed interpretation of EM wave amplitude (squared) as being the probability density of detecting a photon: Again an idea of Einstein’s gave ...
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### Source for this story about Einstein learning algebra from his uncle

I have occasionally run into the following story (or a variation of it) about Albert Einstein: Young Albert did not like algebra, and his uncle is supposed to have aroused his curiosity by telling ...
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### Is it true Einstein doubted relativity near the end of his life?

Heard he wrote a bunch of rambling thoughts near the end of his life and doubted his own theory of relativity...it was in Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson
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### How did Einstein know the Avogadro Number?

Wikipedia says the Avogadro number was determined by Perrin in 1908. But Einstein used the value $$N=6\times 10^{23}$$ as early as 1905 in order to estimate the size of the fluctuations of an ...
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### Duality while studying properties of an ensemble

Was Einstein the first to propose that observing an ensemble of N particles for time interval of dt is same as observing a single particle of ensemble for time interval of Ndt?
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### How did Maxwell fall short of Einstein?

This source (I believe it's in Ukrainian) claims that Maxwell came very close to creating the relativity theory, however, it was the fact that he was adhering to the traditional scientific frame of ...
334 views

### Did Einstein want to reduce general relativity to elementary mathematics?

In this recent article, the authors write Consequently, it is a desideratum to teach general relativity in a way that is based on elementary mathematics only. This objective, already stated by ...
188 views

### What did Albert Einstein mean by "psychical entities"?

I first saw this quote on p. 26: Philip Johnson-Laird BA PhD Psychology (UCL), Stuart Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton. (Author isn't a logician.) How We Reason (1st edn 2008). ...
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### Einstein really didn't "accept" quantum mechanics? [duplicate]

It is sometimes said that Einstein didn't accept quantum mechanics. Some stronger claims are that he viewed it as wrong altogether, considering it not a viable description of nature. Well, I want to ...
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### Did Einstein get inspired by projective geometry?

I read somewhere that projective geometry was an inspiration to Einstein to build the theory of relativity. However, the keyword "projective geometry" isn't mentioned in history of general relativity ...
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### What has Einstein actually written about the chronology of his discoveries?

I have heard some stuff about how Einstein got is ideas from third parties. I've read a biography about him by Walter Isaacson, and a lot of possibly wrong one-liners on the internet. But I'm ...
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### So how much did Mileva Maric contribute to Einstein's work?

I don't believe in the ridiculous conspiracy theories that she was the true founder of relativity and Einstein stole credit from her or any of that but did she play a role in anyway helping him? ...
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### Why did Einstein turn his back on a probabilistic universe?

One of Einstein's famous quotes is "God does not play dice", referring to his dislike of the probabilistic model of the universe, as found by quantum theory. However, in the book "Quantum Mechanics: ...
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### Why didn't Einstein try to include the strong and weak forces in his attempts at a unified theory?

Einstein began working on unified field theory at a time when the weak and strong force were perhaps not known I believe...but as the years proceeded and the weak and strong force were being outlined ...
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### Einstein and the concept of decoherence

WARNIG: Contrafactual question It is commonly known that Einstein was not fond of quantum mechanics -- formulated in the famous quote "God does not play dice with the universe". This quote comes ...
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### Why didn't Einstein win a second Nobel Prize, for relativity?

Einstein's failure to win a Nobel until 1921, and that prize's not being awarded for his work on relativity, is generally ascribed to these factors: Lack of sufficient experimental proof for the ...
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### What was Einstein's contribution to the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paper?

Do we have any insight or document into theoretical development of the EPR papers both in terms of math, ideas and anything related to actual physical problem. I know that Einstein didn't write the ...
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### Was the pre-special relativity discussion a hot topic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century?

We know that low-dimensional materials and topological materials are some of the current hot topics in Physics. Did this happen with the pre-special relativity discussions in the late nineteenth and ...
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### Why did Einstein oppose quantum uncertainity?

Einstein always believed that everything is certain, and we can calculate everything. That's why he rejected quantum mechanics, due to its factor of uncertainty. But still quantum physics was right. ...
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### How did the publication feat of Einstein's four 1905 Annus Mirabilis papers get through peer review?

Einstein's early career is well-known for the lack of success he had applying for assistant lecturer positions with universities; he could not get a position, and he ended up working in a Bern patent ...
I am reading Big Bang by Simon Singh. Here is the short story (as I understood it): Einstein gets a contradiction by assuming that 1- The speed of light $c$ is constant with respect the ether. 2- ...