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.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781400818211
Publisert
2021
Utgiver
Vendor
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter