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.
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