On March 14, 1879, German theoretical physicist Albert Einstein was born, who has become an iconic figure for physics as well as science of the 20th century. He is best known for his theories on special and general relativity, as well as for the discovery of the photoelectric effect - for which he received the Nobel Prize - and he developed what has been named the most famous equation in history, the mass energy equivalence. Of course our history of science and technology (and art) blog wouldn't be complete without mentioning Albert Einstein's birthday. We already had several articles mentioning Einsteins work (The annus mirabilis 1905) or influence (relativity theory, nuclear fission, quantum physics, etc.). Thus, it is high time to take a closer look at the life of the most prominent scientist ever that has even become a popular icon.
On November 22, 1944, British astrophysicist and philosopher Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington passed away. He became famous for his 1919 solar eclipse expedition to Principe, where he conducted astrophysical experiments to give proof for Albert Einstein's seminal theory of general relativity.
The last transit of Venus took place recently on 5 and 6 June 2012, and it was the last Venus transit of the 21st century. Venus transits are very rare events. The next one will be December 10–11, 2117. So it is much likely that this on was the very last Venus transit I had a chance to see in my lifetime.
Relativity: Einstein's theory of special relativity in multimedia tutorial. The introductory level takes 10 minutes, but has links to over 40 explanatory pages giving greater depth and detail. Einstein Light has a simple introduction to Galilean relativity, electromagnetism and their incompatibility; it explains how Einstein's relativity resolves this problem, and develops time dilation, length contraction and other consequences of relativity for our ideas of time, space and mechanics, including the twin paradox and E=mc2.
H. Fliegel, und R. DiEsposti. Proceedings of the 28th Annual Precise Time and Time Interval Systems and Applications Meeting, Seite 189--200. Reston, Virginia, (Dezember 1996)
D. Dolce, und A. Perali. J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 626 (2015) 012062, (2016)cite arxiv:1602.09023Comment: Slightly revised version of the published paper. Presented at DICE2014. 9 pages.
D. Dolce. chapter 4 in "Beyond Peaceful Coexistence The Emergence of Space, Time and Quantum", IMPERIAL COLLEGE PRESS (2016), (2017)cite arxiv:1707.00677Comment: Revised version of the published chapter 4 in "Beyond Peaceful Coexistence The Emergence of Space, Time and Quantum", IMPERIAL COLLEGE PRESS (2016).
S. Tremaine. (2014)cite arxiv:1407.6363Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures. To appear in "From Atoms to the Stars", a special issue of Daedalus (Fall 2014, vol. 143, no. 4).