Einstein's Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics [Hardcover]

I am a nonscientist, general reader, but have read many popular accounts of special relativity. I have always felt shortchanged, though, just at the point where things get most interesting. I think that is because the real physics does lie in the equations, and verbal metaphors fall short. For me, here, for the first time, I see where the science is: just beyond the metaphors. Although I do not follow all the math by any means, so it is partly like listening to a foreign language, I recognized enough of the concepts to get a glimmer: and it is stunning. Here is Einstein himself, deriving E=mc2 in paper 4; so briefly, so lucidly (although another reader from California seems to have missed it). Paper 3 on special relativity is, even to this nonscientist, dazzling.

As a retired physicist I have taken great interest in the history of science, especially the times around the turn of the twentieth century when so many new ideas were put forward which have the basis of quantum mechanics and our current thinking from cosmology to quarks. This little volume is recommended either for bedtime reading or more serious study. The personal history reveals aspects previously unknown to me and the five papers themselves, in their original form, demonstrate Einstein's wonderful insightfulness and ability to make use of every aspect of a problem. Tney are a bit heavy going in themselves, and the mathematics is not for everyone, but what else would one expect from a distillation of so much into so relatively few words. I recommend this book to both the scintist and the layman who seeks a better understanding of these momentous mental leaps.

This book is a compilation of five important papers including Albert Einstein's dissertation, all published in Annalen der Physik the year 1905. The papers are;

(1) "A new determination of molecular dimensions". Which is Einstein's dissertation.

(2) On the motion of Small particles Suspended in Liquids at Rest Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat. This is what is referred to as Brownian Motion.

(3) On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. This is what is referred to as the special theory of relativity. This paper is to some degree a synthesis of work done by H.A. Lorentz and Henri Poincare, which is common in science (and Lorentz is given his fair due).

(4) Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content? This is essentially E = mc² and is an extension of the aforementioned paper.

(5) On a heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light. This is his paper on the photo electric effect and the quantum hypothesis. This is what Einstein got his Nobel price for. However, both (2) and (3) above are often considered to be Nobel Prize work.

The way I see it, these papers are of great historical value and it is awesome to be able to read the originals. However, I do not recommend this book as a good introduction to any of this material. As an engineering physics student I encountered most of the content of these papers in a more complete and clearer format. For example, the special theory of relativity is explained better in many text books on physics. Remember these papers are research papers not educational texts. That does not mean that I endorse the many non-mathematical popularizations of the topic that often end up misleading the reader. I should add, however, that in many texts on the special theory of relativity its foundation in electrodynamics is lost or downplayed, so reading the original will remind the student where it really came from.

I was surprised to see how the formula K0 - K1 = Lv²/ (2V²) was derived. This formula states the change in the kinetic energy of a body emitting radiation with energy L/2 in each direction. An implicit approximation (K = mv²/2, classic kinetic energy) was cancelled out by a MacLaurin/Taylor expansion and a corresponding approximation (when dropping terms). This is not wrong, and the proof is still valid, but it seems unnecessary to use approximations from classical mechanics when it is just as easy to make do without them. In any case from this formula it is concluded that when a body that emits the energy L in the form of radiation, then its mass decreases by L/V², or E = mc² ("V" is "c" plus classic formula above).

However, the formula E = mc² can be easily derived directly from the special theory of relativity without any approximation, which he did at a later date. You integrate E = F S (where S is distance) using the relativistic formulas for force and mass. In any case the paper proves the genial insight that "that the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content", which is worth perhaps yet another Nobel Prize. It is also short paper.

I can add that Einstein's opus magnum, the general theory of relativity, came much later 1915/1916. Some other huge achievements were "stimulated emission" the principle behind the laser, Bose-Einstein statistics, and relativistic cosmology. In addition he also did the following, critical opalescence, the geometrization of physics, unified field theory, the EPR paradox, the Einstein refrigerator, a refrigerator without any moving parts, and much more. So 1905 was a very good start, a miracle year, but still just the beginning.

Anyway, reading the originals is thrilling. It is recommended reading to anyone who is literate in physics, and also recommended to anyone who would like to have these master pieces in his library.