Five extraordinary papers by Albert Einstein that transformed physics,
edited and introduced by John Stachel and with a foreword by Nobel
laureate Roger Penrose
After 1905, Einstein's miraculous year, physics would never be the same
again. In those twelve months, Einstein shattered many cherished
scientific beliefs with five extraordinary papers that would establish
him as the world's leading physicist. This book brings those papers
together in an accessible format. The best-known papers are the two that
founded special relativity: On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies
and Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content? In the
former, Einstein showed that absolute time had to be replaced by a new
absolute: the speed of light. In the second, he asserted the equivalence
of mass and energy, which would lead to the famous formula E = mc2
.
The book also includes On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the
Production and Transformation of Light, in which Einstein challenged
the wave theory of light, suggesting that light could also be regarded
as a collection of particles. This helped to open the door to a whole
new world--that of quantum physics. For ideas in this paper, he won the
Nobel Prize in 1921.
The fourth paper also led to a Nobel Prize, although for another
scientist, Jean Perrin. On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in
Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat
concerns the Brownian motion of such particles. With profound insight,
Einstein blended ideas from kinetic theory and classical hydrodynamics
to derive an equation for the mean free path of such particles as a
function of the time, which Perrin confirmed experimentally. The fifth
paper, A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions, was Einstein's
doctoral dissertation, and remains among his most cited articles. It
shows how to calculate Avogadro's number and the size of molecules.
These papers, presented in a modern English translation, are essential
reading for any physicist, mathematician, or astrophysicist. Far more
than just a collection of scientific articles, this book presents work
that is among the high points of human achievement and marks a watershed
in the history of science.
Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the miraculous year, this new
paperback edition includes an introduction by John Stachel, which
focuses on the personal aspects of Einstein's youth that facilitated and
led up to the miraculous year.
