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

Albert Einstein (Author), John Stachel (Editor), Roger Penrose (Foreword)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0691059381 | ISBN-13: 978-0691059389 | Publication Date: March 30, 1998

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

The anno mirabilis was 1905, when an obscure patent examiner published several papers. This volume consists of translations of Einstein's revolutionary papers that year, with introductions by physicist Roger Penrose and others that explain why these papers are among the most important scientific documents of this century--if not all time. As a group they are notable for bridging mechanical theories of physics--particles whizzing around--and the relativistic view. In the former category, Einstein figured out the sizes of molecules, and that their bombardments kept microscopic particles in motion, both mysterious matters hitherto. The relativity papers announce the two things everyone knows about Einstein besides his iconic appearance, that energy and mass are equivalent and that time is not absolute. That the soul of this book is Ph.D.-level mathematics doesn't disqualify it from public libraries: mightn't some wunderkind of the future fondly remember in her memoirs the day she discovered Einstein's actual equations in the stacks? Gilbert Taylor

Review

In these excellent new translations of Einstein's papers, the economy and freshness of Einstein's style come through with undiminished force. . . . To re-read these papers is to relive perhaps the most dramatic year in the history of physics.
(Werner Israel Physics World )

Read this beautifully translated and edited collection and enjoy an encounter with one of the greatest minds at work and five of the greatest physics papers of [the twentieth] century.
(David C. Cassidy American Journal of Physics )

I find myself thrilled by these papers. Why? Because through the original choice of words and arguments, through the simple but profound ideas and thought processes . . . I have been able to gaze into the mind of this great scientist in a way that no distillation or restatement or commentary would allow. In these papers one can see an enormously gifted human being grappling with the nature of the world.
(Alan Lightman Atlantic Monthly )

Drawing heavily on his subject's autobiographical reflections about the relationship between thought and language in his struggles to understand deep physical problems, Stachel paints a not-unfamiliar picture of Einstein as a solitary genius whose driving ideas were entirely his own.
(David E. Rowe Times Higher Education Supplement )

John Stachel devotes several pages to rebutting recent claims that Einstein's first wife, Mileva Maric, co-authored the 1905 papers. . . . [R]elativity and the quantum revolution sprang from the subtle gray matter of Einstein's brain alone.
(PD Smith The Guardian )

Einstein's Miraculous Year provides a well-considered look back at the seminal ideas that eventually helped make Einstein a household name. . . . [I]t's never too late to take a closer look at the century-old work that revolutionized [physics].
(Ryan Wyatt Planetarian )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 198 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (March 30, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691059381
• ISBN-13: 978-0691059389
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,243,327 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was born in Germany and became an American citizen in 1940. A world-famous theoretical physicist, he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics and is renowned for his Theory of Relativity. In addition to his scientific work, Einstein was an influential humanist who spoke widely about politics, ethics, and social causes. After leaving Europe, Einstein taught at Princeton University. His theories were instrumental in shaping the atomic age.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, the real thing; not just inaccurate verbal metaphor, November 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: 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.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Heart of the Matter, August 23, 2005

By 

Severin Crisp (Albany, Western Australia) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Einstein's Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics (Paperback)

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.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars E = mc˛, October 31, 2007

By 

Thomas Wikman "Texas Swede" (Texas) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Einstein's Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics (Paperback)

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 = mc˛ 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 = Lv˛/ (2V˛) 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 = mv˛/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/V˛, or E = mc˛ ("V" is "c" plus classic formula above).

However, the formula E = mc˛ 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.