29
votes
What was the motivation for Minkowski spacetime before special relativity?
Not quite. Minkowski had the idea of representing special ralativity as geometry in 1907 under the direct influence of Einstein's 1905 paper, and he developed it in Raum und Zeit (1907) and Zwei ...
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29
votes
Accepted
How was Einstein led to make a contact with Differential Geometry for his theory of General Relativity?
Einstein himself told the story in his Kyoto address of 1922, which I quote from Pais's biography titled Subtle is the Lord:
"If all systems are equivalent, then Euclidean geometry cannot hold in ...
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25
votes
What was the relationship between Einstein and Minkowski?
A good account is Weinstein, Max Born, Albert Einstein and Hermann Minkowski's Space-Time Formalism of Special Relativity. They did no have much of a relationship, what it was is well-summarized by ...
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21
votes
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Did Lorentz remain an ether advocate till his death?
Lorentz did remain sympathetic to ether to the end. However, it was not necessarily to his original conception of ether, and it was not "despite the empirical successes" of special ...
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18
votes
Accepted
Did Richard Feynman ever meet Stephen Hawking or comment on Hawking radiation?
I take that your primary goal is to know what Feynman thought of Hawking's work. While it is possible that they have met I would consider it unlikely given that Feynman mentioned several times how his ...
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16
votes
Did amateurs ever produce important proofs or similar?
A case from this year is that of Aubrey de Grey.
Aubrey de Grey, a biologist known for his claims that people alive today will live to the age of 1,000, posted a paper to the scientific preprint site ...
- 601
15
votes
Articles published without their authors being aware
In theoretical physics, the celebrated 1948 Alpher–Bethe–Gamow paper, or αβγ paper on cosmic nucleosynthesis.
Bethe's name was thrown in, unbeknownst to him, at first, as a practical joke, for which G ...
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14
votes
What led to the fall of Göttingen?
It's worth noting that we can't just pin it down to "The Nazi regime" and we may have to just say "The Nazis." Take for instance the case of Landau. He could not be purged as such ...
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14
votes
Who was the first to say "Shut up and calculate!"?
Some centuries before Mermin, Leibniz in the 17th century was seeking a solution to some of the denominational quarrels that were plaguing his generation by envisioning a calculus ratiocinator that ...
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13
votes
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Max Planck's reaction to Einstein's 1905 STR Paper
It seems not. See:
A.Douglas Stone, Einstein and the quantum: The quest of the valiant Swabian (2013):
[page 6] Planck was the first major figure to recognize Einstein’s seminal 1905 work on ...
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12
votes
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Why did Einstein develop General Relativity?
"Simply modifying" Newtonian gravity to have it spread at finite speed does not work if the finite speed is the speed of light. It was attempted by Laplace in his Celestial Mechanics (1799), who found ...
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12
votes
Accepted
Who was the first to say "Shut up and calculate!"?
Mermin has a thorough analysis[1] and traces the phrase to himself in a 1989 Physics Today column [2] & makes a case that the numerous attributions to Feynman may or may not be mistaken.
[1] Could ...
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11
votes
Who was the first to say "Shut up and calculate!"?
As noted, Mermin was probably the first to utter the exact words “Shut up and calculate”. However, the equivalent rallying cry of “Get the numbers out” has its origins some decades earlier.
According ...
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11
votes
Accepted
How did 19th century physicists do their undergraduate/graduate studies?
The status of scientific education in the 19th century is a very complicated mess, especially for the fact that every country worked different than the others. I know of no book or article that ...
- 718
11
votes
Accepted
On early US patriotism to choose quark color charge labels
According to the best source, "red, white, and blue" were proposed in honour of France, not the United States.
As discussed in the answer to "Quantum chromodynamics - an origin of the ...
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10
votes
Accepted
Did Feynman develop QED based on Stueckelberg's manuscript?
There seems to be enough evidence to believe that people were joking around about Stueckelberg's notes in 1965, when the Nobel prize was awarded to Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga, but I do not see ...
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10
votes
Accepted
Was Dirac really trying to take the square root of the Klein-Gordon operator?
One routinely speaks of the Dirac operator as a square root of the Laplacian (or Dalembertian as the case may be), and Dirac himself rather supports this heuristic in his Recollections of an exciting ...
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10
votes
Accepted
Who did say that anyone who discover a new particle should be fined instead of receiving a prize?
According to a slide deck I found, it was Willis Lamb. Quote from said deck:
In 1955, Willis Lamb started his Nobel Prize acceptance speech by
saying that “maybe physicists discovering a new ...
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9
votes
Why were 20th Century German scientists so impressive?
Given the historical circumstances the German education system might or might not have played a significant role in the formation of these scientists. In his collection of essays entitled "Brocas ...
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9
votes
Who was the first to say "Shut up and calculate!"?
N. David Mermin (born March 30, 1935, in New Haven, Connecticut, USA) is Horace White Professor of Physics Emeritus at Cornell University
his quote was like this
If I were forced to sum up in one ...
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9
votes
Why is the action from the principle of least action traditionally denoted $S$?
The notation was introduced by Hamilton in 1834, who shifted the focus from the original Maupertuis-Euler version of the least action principle. The tradition followed him probably because his ...
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9
votes
Accepted
When did the use of complex numbers become widespread in physics?
It depends on the definition of "widespread". Mathematicians certainly used them in 18th century. They play prominent role in the work of Cauchy and Fourier (which belongs to both physics ...
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9
votes
Did amateurs ever produce important proofs or similar?
A well-known example is the work of Marjorie Rice on pentagonal tilings of the plane.
Wikipeidia:
In December 1975, Rice came across a Scientific American article on tessellations. Despite having ...
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9
votes
Why was the Greek letter psi (Ψ) chosen to represent the wave function?
Prior to Schrodinger
There is no use of the symbol by de Broglie, Schrodinger's predecessor. In the first three short notes from de Broglie on the topic of wave mechanics (1923), there is no use of ...
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8
votes
What was the motivation for Minkowski spacetime before special relativity?
Minkowski space time was considered by mathematicians before Einstein and before Minkowski. Of course the name "space-time" was not used. The reasons were purely mathematical, not physical. The most ...
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8
votes
What did it historically mean in physics for something to "exist"?
To not be measured is not to have any behavior. No dynamic is induced on any other system in the universe by this object (Rosen 1978).
Objects without behavior do not exist. Their behavior is that ...
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8
votes
How Einstein got the first idea for special relativity?
Einstein was reading Maxwell.
Axiom a) follows from Maxwell's electromagnetic theory of light. Axiom b) is stated imprecisely in your message. The actual axiom is that you cannot detect the absolute ...
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