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Einstein, 1905-2005: Poincaré Seminar 2005 (Progress in Mathematical Physics)

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Sub-Title: Poincar Seminar 2005 (Progress in Mathematical Physics) ==In 1905 Einstein, then an unknown physicist, published three papers in a single issue of the most important physics journal in Germany. ==One of thse papers would have earned him an honorable mention in physical chemistry textbooks. One (on the basic theory of how TV picture tubes work) got him a Nobel Prize . The third was the Theory of Relativity. ==In 2005 a conference was held with the subject to be Einstein's 1905 papers. This book is a reprint of the papers given at that conference. The papers vary from a previously unpublished paper Einstein wrote in 1910. Through some reports on the current state of research in the three subjects

My favorite was a paper on how Einstein came up with his theory. There are lots of guesses:

a sudden moment of brilliant insight,

the fact that experiments over the previous twenty or so years and various theories that resolved them allowed Einstein to simply put them together ,

there's the point of view that he reached his theory by a philosophical criticism of Newton's laws ,

there's a new theory that his first wife (who was probably a better mathematician than he) was really responsible ,

the fact that tensor calculus had just been invented and was used in the proof.

The answer, of course, is that we don't know what make genius. Yes there were cracks in Newtonian physics, but all the other physicists of the time knew about them. None of them put it all together.

This is not a book for the casual reader. But for the interested reader it is fascinating.