In a brief, accessible article, John Stewart Bell (1976) describes presenting a thought experiment to his colleagues, which attracted considerable attention at… COPIED. Eventually, confidence led to its breaking. “Is it really so?” Bell asked his colleagues. According to Bell’s account, “a clear consensus emerged that the thread would not break!” (Bell, 1976, 136).
Continue readingTag Archives: Einstein
Einstein’s Relativity/Thermodynamics Analogy. Some Evidence from His Later Years
In a 1919 article for the Times of London, Einstein declared the relativity to be a ‘principle theory’, like thermodynamics, rather than a “constructive theory”, like the kinetic theory of gases.
Continue readingThe Untranslated Appendix to Reichenbach’s ‘The Philosophy of Space and Time’
In 1958 Hans Reichenbach’s second wife Maria Reichenbach and John Freund edited an English translation of the Philosophie der Raum-Zeit-Lehre . The Philosophy of space and time turned out to be one of the most influential books in the history of philosophy of physics. For those who never read the German original, it might come as a surprise that the English version is missing the translation of an Appendix entitled ‘Weyl’s Extension of Riemann’s Concept of Space and the Geometrical Interpretation of Electromagnetism.’ The Appendix covers around 50 pages of the German original, the Philosophie der Raum-Zeit-Lehre—not few considering that Reichenbach dedicated roughly 60 pages of the book to general relativity.