Date: December 6, 2005
Location: Auditorium 1007 of the Faculty of Letters, UFMG

A century ago, a young physicist, Albert Einstein, presented a new, already completed theory. This theory, which came to be called the special theory of relativity, revolutionized the classical explanation of the physical world by destroying two of its most fundamental concepts—absolute space and absolute time—and making the speed of light in a vacuum a universal constant, an upper limit for speeds in the universe. That same year, he published four other notable scientific papers. One of these, which places him among the founders of quantum physics—another scientific revolution of the 20th century—proposed that light was composed of localized units of energy, called light quanta. Two other papers presented solid arguments supporting the atomic constitution of matter. The last paper published that year related the inertia of a body to its energy content and introduced the best-known equation in physics, E = mc². All these works are characterized by their interdisciplinarity, with regard to the major conceptual domains of physics. At the conference, they will be approached conceptually, without mathematical formalism, and Einstein’s epistemology will be briefly discussed.

Speaker: Professor Ramayana Gazzinelli – Institute of Exact Sciences at UFMG.

Ramayana Gazzinelli is an experimental physicist who worked in condensed matter physics. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University in New York. He is Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Exact Sciences at UFMG. He is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.