Customer Reviews

The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 2: The Swiss Years: Writings, 1900-1909 (Original texts)

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Translations of Einstein's papers are scattered around, but are generally hard to find. This volume brings together a decade of Einstien's scientific papers translated into English. The editors have chosen to leave in the mistakes and typographical errors and refer the reader to the documentary edition (which I believe can be purchased directly from Princeton University Press, but not on Amazon). This documentary edition is a printing of the original German articles with extensive introductions and footnotes in English. If you are not comfortable reading technical papers auf Deutsch and choose this English version over the documentary edition, then you lose the benefit of the footnotes. Even that benefit is limited. I worked through the details of Einstein's thesis with the footnotes from the documentary edition. Several errors in the thesis are not noted and there are some errors in the footnotes themselves. The collection contains several early papers of Einstein that I have never before seen translated. There are also reviews of articles which Einstein wrote on other papers. These reviews will be of limited interest for most readers. Overall, it is a great pleasure to see how Einstein originally presented his great works on relativity, Brownian motion, photoelectric effect, the dimension of molecules, etc.

All the Einstein life is very intersting! For the 20st centuryworld life the 1900-1909 Einstein period is the apex of his scientificcontributions, specially for three papers: those about the Brownian Movement, the Photoelectric Effects and Eletromagnetic Effects when there is a referencial change. All three papers brought to ous news interpretations of those phenomena and revealed the Einstein interpretation capacity of visible and not-visible world. The paper about Photoelectric Effects presented a new quantum views of ligh and material interaction while the Eletromagnetic Effects showed the principles of Special Relativity, a theme that transverse the 20st century and arrive at 21st century without popular technology applications. This book brings a opened, stimulant, and helpful explanations - great lectures - about the principals Einstein ideas. Maybe this book is the first to point closely the life and thinking of a science men.