Enduring Echoes from Einstein’s Academic Visit to Paris in 1922

In April 1922, Albert Einstein visited Paris and interacted extensively with an illustrious section of French academia. In overfilled sessions at the College de France and the Sorbonne, Einstein explained his theories of relativity, and prominent physicists, mathematicians and philosophers listened, debated, questioned and explored facets of relativity. The 1922 visit had its echoes in the life and works of many who participated and resonating even now at the depths of fundamental physics. The visit and the debates were particularly decisive for Einstein and the philosopher Henri Bergson. This talk is a physicist’s researched commentary on that dissonance that endured. I give particular attention to the logical and empirical accuracy of the physics issues involved, focusing on universal time, duration and simultaneity, and global synchronization of clocks, clearly distinguishing beliefs and facts.

About the Speaker:

C. S. Unnikrishnan's research interests are experimental and theoretical aspects of fundamental issues in gravity and quantum physics. He set up the laser-cooling laboratory at TIFR, where the first Bose-Einstein condensate in India was produced. Major theoretical contributions are the theory of Cosmic Relativity, based on the gravity of the matter in the universe, and a universal action-mechanics, solving the widely debated foundational problems of quantum mechanics. Unnikrishnan is a proposer-scientist of the LIGO-India project and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration that detected the gravitational waves. More details on Unnikrishnan's research are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/unniphysics.