In his book, Physical Relativity, Harvey Brown challenges the orthodox view that special relativity is preferable to those parts of Lorentz's classical ether theory it replaced because it revealed various phenomena that were given a dynamical explanation in Lorentz's theory to be purely kinematical. I want to defend this orthodoxy. The phenomena most commonly discussed in this context in the philosophical literature are length contraction and time dilation. I consider three other phenomena of this kind that played a role in (...) the early reception of special relativity in the physics literature: the Fresnel drag effect in the Fizeau experiment, the velocity dependence of electron mass in beta-ray deflection experiments by Kaufmann and others, and the delicately balanced torques on a moving charged capacitor in the Trouton-Noble experiment. I offer historical sketches of how Lorentz's dynamical explanations of these phenomena came to be replaced by their now standard kinematical explanations. I then take up the philosophical challenge posed by the work of Harvey Brown and Oliver Pooley and clarify how those kinematical explanations work. (shrink)

In 1909, Einstein derived a formula for the mean square energy fluctuation in blackbody radiation. This formula is the sum of a wave term and a particle term. In a key contribution to the 1926 Dreim¨.

Professor Rudolph A. Marcus, recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, is a distinguished theoretical chemist. Two important theories happen to bear his name: the Rice Ramsperger Kassel Marcus theory of unimolecular reactions and the Marcus theory of electron transfer reactions. When considering Marcus’ work, one finds characteristics of it that bear striking similarity to those that can be found in the work of some famous scientists. Such characteristics appear then as common recurring patterns in the work of theoreticians. (...) Among them we find the following: the creation of new theories, driven by experiments that preceding theories were unable to explain; the use of thought experiments; the generalization and extensions from one realm of science to another; the making of predictions and the finding of new properties from correlations among series of data; the use of variational principles; the providing of different demonstrations of an equation; the introduction of new types of coordinates; the innovative capacity to use, by somehow recreating it under the pressure of the physical problem, a mathematical method previously unknown to the author; and finally, the presentation of formulations of the same theory in different mathematical and physical languages. Before discussing in some detail the above points, a brief description of Marcus’ work is first presented for the convenience of the reader. (shrink)