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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
Frank Jackson
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Walter Kaufmann
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Hilary Kornblith
Christine Korsgaard
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
Andrea Lavazza
Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Jules Lequyer
Leucippus
Michael Levin
Joseph Levine
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
Nicholas Maxwell
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Plato
Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
Protagoras
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Jean-Paul Sartre
Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
Peter Unger
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Hendrik Lorentz
Werner Loewenstein
Josef Loschmidt
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Wilder Penfield
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Walter Pitts
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Zenon Pylyshyn
Henry Quastler
Adolphe Quételet
Pasco Rakic
Nicolas Rashevsky
Lord Rayleigh
Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
David Shiang
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
Libb Thims
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Alan Turing
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. S. Unnikrishnan
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
Abraham Pais
Abraham Pais was the pre-eminent historian of quantum physics in the twentieth century. He wrote three masterpieces in the 1980's - Subtle is the Lord..., on the work of Albert Einstein (1982), Inward Bound on the history of the physics of matter and their forces , and Niels Bohr's Times. Unfortunately, as one of the many devoted protégées of Bohr, Pais lets Bohr's work overshadow the original source of many of the critical concepts of quantum mechanics, Albert Einstein.

In 1949 Pais had organized a Festschrift in honor of Einstein's seventieth birthday for the Reviews of Modern Physics, Volume 21, Issue 3. He did not himself write one of the thirty-seven articles, but it is striking that so little is about Einstein and quantum theory, primarily the Louis de Broglie's article and Phillip Frank's retrospective.

To be sure, thirty years later Pais published a long article "Einstein and the Quantum Theory" in 1979 in Rev Mod Phys, Volume 51, Issue 4. This appeared virtually unchanged as chapters 18-26 of Subtle is the Lord seven years later. Pais began with an outline of Einstein's contributions to quantum theory.

the physics community at large had received the light-quantum hypothesis with disbelief and with skepticism bordering on derision. As one of the architects of the pre-1925 quantum theory, the “old” quantum theory, Einstein had quickly found both enthusiastic and powerful support for one of his two major contributions to this field: the quantum theory of specific heat. (There is no reason to believe that such support satisfied any particular need in him.) By sharp contrast, from 1905 to 1923, he was a man apart in being the only one, or almost the only one, to take the light-quantum seriously.

The critical reaction to Einstein’s light-quantum hypothesis of 1905 is of great importance for an understanding of the early developments in quantum physics. It was also a reaction without parallel in Einstein’s scientific career. Deservedly, his papers before 1905 had not attracted much attention. But his work on Brownian motion drew immediate and favorable response. The same is true for relativity. Planck became an advocate of the special theory only months after its publication; the younger generation took note as well. Lorentz, Hilbert, F. Klein, and others had followed the evolution of his ideas on general relativity; after 1915 they and others immediately started to work out its consequences. Attitudes to his work on unified field theory were largely critical. Many regarded these efforts as untimely, but few rejected the underlying idea out of hand. In regard to the quantum theory, however, Einstein almost constantly stood apart, from 1905 until his death. Those years cover two disparate periods, the first of which (1905-1923) I have just mentioned. During the second period, from 1926 until the end of his life, he was the only one, or again nearly the only one, to maintain a profoundly skeptical attitude toward quantum mechanics. I shall discuss Einstein’s position on quantum mechanics in Chapter 25, but cannot refrain from stating at once that Einstein’s skepticism should not be equated with a purely negative attitude. It is true that he was forever critical of quantum mechanics, but at the same time he had his own alternative program for a synthetic theory in which particles, fields, and quantum phenomena all would find their place. Einstein pursued this program from about 1920 (before the discovery of quantum mechanics!) until the end of his life. Numerous discussions with him in his later years have helped me gain a better understanding of his views.

But let me first return to the days of the old quantum theory. Einstein’s contributions to it can be grouped under the following headings.

(a) The Light-Quantum. In 1900 Planck discovered the blackbody radiation law without using light-quanta. In 1905 Einstein discovered light-quanta without using Planck’s law. Chapter 19 is devoted to the light-quantum hypothesis. The interplay between the ideas of Planck and Einstein is discussed. A brief history of the photoelectric effect from 1887 to 1915 is given. This Chapter ends with a detailed account of the reasons why the light-quantum paper drew such a negative response.

(b) Specific Heats. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, there existed grave conflicts between the data on specific heats and their interpretation in terms of the equipartition theorem of classical statistical mechanics. In 1906 Einstein completed the first paper on quantum effects in the solid state. This paper showed the way out of these paradoxes and also played an important role in the final formulation of the third law of thermodynamics. These topics are discussed in Chapter 20.

(c) The Photon. The light-quantum as originally defined was a parcel of energy. The concept of the photon as a particle with definite energy and momentum emerged only gradually. Einstein himself did not discuss photon momentum until 1917. Relativistic energy momentum conservation relations involving photons were not written down till 1923. Einstein’s role in these developments is discussed in Chapter 21, which begins with Einstein’s formulation in 1909 of the particle-wave duality for the case of electromagnetic radiation and also contains an account of his discovery of the A and B coefficients and of his earliest concern with the breakdown of classical causality. The Chapter concludes with remarks on the role of the Compton effect. The reader may wonder why the man who discovered the relation E = hv for light in 1905 and who propounded the special theory of relativity in that same year would not have stated sooner the relation p = hv/c. I shall comment on this question in Section 25d.

(d) Einstein’s work on quantum statistics is treated in Chapter 23, which also includes a discussion of Bose’s contribution.

(e) Einstein’s role as a key transitional figure in the discovery of wave mechanics will be discussed in Chapter 24.

References
Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein. Oxford University Press, USA. (1982)

Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World. Oxford University Press, USA. (1986)

Niels Bohr's Times, In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity. Oxford University Press, USA. (1991)

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