Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2005 APS April Meeting
Saturday–Tuesday, April 16–19, 2005; Tampa, FL
Session J5: Einstein and Friends |
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Sponsoring Units: FHP Chair: Robert H. Romer, Amherst College Room: Marriott Tampa Waterside Grand Salon G/H |
Sunday, April 17, 2005 10:45AM - 11:21AM |
J5.00001: Einstein and Besso: Not a Partnership of Equals Invited Speaker: In the 1905 special relativity paper Einstein famously acknowledged the help of his friend and colleague Michele Besso. Besso had been an ideal sounding board for Einstein's ideas. During the years that Einstein developed general relativity, Besso was a good deal more than a sounding board. He collaborated with Einstein on calculations of the perihelion motion of Mercury in 1913. His contributions were substantial and would have warranted co-authorship of Einstein's famous paper on Mercury's perihelion of November 1915, in which Besso is not mentioned at all. Besso also alerted Einstein to problems with the early version of general relativity that Einstein had worked out together with Marcel Grossmann. Einstein essentially ignored Besso's warnings. In addition, Besso went out of his way during this period to act as a mediator between a not always appreciative Einstein, living in Berlin with his cousin Elsa who would become his second wife, and his estranged first wife Mileva, living in Zurich with the couple's two young sons. This period is much better documented than the period leading up to the 1905 paper and consequently much more revealing about the nature of the relationship between Einstein and Besso. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 17, 2005 11:21AM - 11:57AM |
J5.00002: Einstein, Mach, and the Fortunes of Gravity Invited Speaker: Early in his life, Albert Einstein considered himself a devoted student of the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach. Mach's famous critiques of Newton's absolute space and time -- most notably Mach's explanation of Newton's bucket experiment -- held a strong sway over Einstein as he struggled to formulate general relativity. Einstein was convinced that his emerging theory of gravity should be consistent with Mach's principle, which states that local inertial effects arise due to gravitational interactions with distant matter. Once completed, Einstein's general relativity enjoyed two decades of worldwide attention, only to fall out of physicists' interest during the 1930s and 1940s, when topics like nuclear physics claimed center stage. Gravity began to return to the limelight during the 1950s and especially the 1960s, and once again Mach proved to be a major spur: Princeton physicists Carl Brans and Robert Dicke introduced a rival theory of gravity in 1961 which they argued satisfied Mach's principle better than Einstein's general relativity did. The Brans-Dicke theory, and the new generation of experiments designed to test its predictions against those of general relativity, played a major role in bringing Einstein's beloved topic back to the center of physics. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 17, 2005 11:57AM - 12:33PM |
J5.00003: Einstein and Bose Invited Speaker: In June 1924, a relatively unknown Satyendra Nath Bose from Dacca, India, wrote a letter to Einstein beginning with ``Respected Sir, I have ventured to send you the accompanying article for your perusal. I am anxious to know what you think of it. You will see that I have ventured to deduce the coefficient 8$\pi \upsilon ^{2}$/c$^{3 }$in Planck's law independent of the classical electrodynamics, only assuming that the ultimate elementary regions in Phase-space have the content $h^{3}$. I do not know sufficient German to translate the paper. If you think the paper worth publication, I shall be grateful if you arrange for its publication in \textit{Zeitschrift f\"{u}r Physik.'' } Einstein did translate the article himself and got it published. He wrote to Ehrenfest: ``The Indian Bose has given a beautiful derivation of Planck's law, including the constant [i.e.8$\pi \upsilon ^{2}$/c$^{3}$].'' Einstein extended the ideas of Bose that implied, among other things, a \textit{new }statistics for the light-quanta to the molecules of an ideal gas and wrote to Ehrenfest, `from a certain temperature on, the molecules ``condense'' without attractive forces, that is, they accumulate at zero velocity. The theory is pretty, but is there also some truth to it?' Abraham Pais has called Bose's paper ``the fourth and the last revolutionary papers of the old quantum theory.'' My paper will present the works of Bose and Einstein in their historical perspective and the eventual birth of the new quantum Bose-Einstein statistics. [Preview Abstract] |
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