einstein

4. Einstein 1949b, 19.
5. For the influence of Faraday’s induction theories on Einstein, see Miller 1981, chapter 3.
6. Einstein and Infeld, 244; Overbye, 40; Bernstein 1996a, 49.
7. Einstein to Conrad Habicht, May 18 or 25, 1905.
8. Sent on Mar. 17, 1905, and published in Annalen der Physik 17 (1905). I want to thank Yale professor Douglas Stone for help with this
section.
9. Max Born, obituary for Max Planck, Royal Society of London, 1948.
10. John Heilbron, The Dilemmas of an Upright Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Lucid explanations of Einstein’s
quantum paper, from which this section is drawn, include Gribbin and Gribbin; Bernstein 1996a, 2006; Overbye, 118–121; Stachel 1998;
Rigden; A. Douglas Stone, “Genius and Genius 2 : Planck, Einstein and the Birth of Quantum Theory,” Aspen Center for Physics,
unpublished lecture, July 20, 2005.
11. Planck’s approach was probably a bit more complex and involved assuming a group of oscillators and positing a total energy that is an
integer multiple of a quantum unit. Bernstein 2006, 157–161.
12. Max Planck, speech to the Berlin Physical Society, Dec. 14, 1900. See Light-man 2005, 3.
13. Einstein 1949b, 46. Miller 1984, 112; Miller 1999, 50; Rynasiewicz and Renn, 5.
14. Einstein, “On the General Molecular Theory of Heat,” Mar. 27, 1904.
15. Einstein to Conrad Habicht, Apr. 15, 1904. Jeremy Bernstein discussed the connections between the 1904 and 1905 papers in an e-mail,
July 29, 2005.
16. Einstein, “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light,” Mar. 17, 1905.
17. “We are startled, wondering what happened to the waves of light of the 19th century theory and marveling at how Einstein could see the
signature of atomic discreteness in the bland formulae of thermodynamics,” says the science historian John D. Norton. “Einstein takes
what looks like a dreary fragment of the thermodynamics of heat radiation, an empirically based expression for the entropy of a volume of
high-frequency heat radiation. In a few deft inferences he converts this expression into a simple, probabilistic formula whose unavoidable
interpretation is that the energy of radiation is spatially localized in finitely many, independent points.” Norton 2006c, 73. See also
Lightman 2005, 48.
18. Einstein’s paper in 1906 noted clearly that Planck had not grasped the full implications of the quantum theory. Apparently, Besso
encouraged Einstein not to make this criticism of Planck too explicit. As Besso wrote much later, “In helping you edit your publications on
the quanta, I deprived you of a part of your glory, but, on the other hand, I made a friend for you in Planck.” Michele Besso to Einstein, Jan.
17, 1928. See Rynasiewicz and Renn, 29; Bernstein 1991, 155.
19. Holton and Brush, 395.
20. Gilbert Lewis coined the name “photon” in 1926. Einstein in 1905 discovered a quantum of light. Only later, in 1916, did he discuss the
quantum’s momentum and its zero rest mass. Jeremy Bernstein has noted that one of the most interesting discoveries Einstein did not
make in 1905 was the photon. Jeremy Bernstein, letter to the editor, Physics Today , May 2006.
21. Gribbin and Gribbin, 81.
22. Max Planck to Einstein, July 6, 1907.
23. Max Planck and three others to the Prussian Academy, June 12, 1913, CPAE 5: 445.
24. Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 44; Max Born, “Einstein’s Statistical Theories,” in Schilpp,
163.
25. Quoted in Gerald Holton, “Millikan’s Struggle with Theory,”Europhysics News 31 (2000): 3.
26. Einstein to Michele Besso, Dec. 12, 1951, AEA 7-401.
27. Completed Apr. 30, 1905, submitted to the University of Zurich on July 20, 1905, submitted to Annalen der Physik in revised form on Aug.
19, 1905, and published by Annalen der Physik Jan. 1906. See Norton 2006c and www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/Einstein_stat_1905/.
28. Jos Uffink, “Insuperable Difficulties: Einstein’s Statistical Road to Molecular Physics,”Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern
Physics 37 (2006): 37, 60.
29. bulldog.u-net.com/avogadro/avoga.html.
30. Rigden, 48–52; Bernstein 1996a, 88; Gribbin and Gribbin, 49–54; Pais 1982, 88.
31. Hoffmann 1972, 55; Seelig 1956b, 72; Pais 1982, 88–89.
32. Brownian motion introduction, CPAE 2 (German), p. 206; Rigden, 63.
33. Einstein, “On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in Liquids at Rest Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat,” submitted to
the Annalen der Physik on May 11, 1905.
34. Einstein 1949b, 47.
35. The root mean square average is asymptotic to ff2n/?. Good analyses of the relationship of random walks to Einstein’s Brownian motion
are in Gribbin and Gribbin, 61; Bernstein 2006, 117. I am grateful to George Stranahan of the Aspen Center for Physics for his help on the
mathematics behind this relationship.
36. Einstein, “On the Theory of Brownian Motion,” 1906, CPAE 2: 32 (in which he notes Seidentopf ’s results); Gribbin and Gribbin, 63; Clark,
89; Max Born, “Einstein’s Statistical Theories,” in Schilpp, 166.
CHAPTER SIX: SPECIAL RELATIVITY
1. Contemporary historical research on Einstein’s special theory begins with Gerald Holton’s essay, “On the Origins of the Special Theory of
Relativity” (1960), reprinted in Holton 1973, 165. Holton remains a guiding light in this field. Most of his earlier essays are incorporated in his
books Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein (1973), Einstein, History and Other Passions (2000), and The Scientific
Imagination, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Einstein’s popular description is his 1916 book, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory , and his more technical description is his
1922 book, The Meaning of Relativity.
For good explanations of special relativity, see Miller 1981, 2001; Galison; Bernstein 2006; Calder; Feynman 1997; Hoffmann 1983; Kaku;
Mermin; Penrose; Sartori; Taylor and Wheeler 1992; Wolfson.
This chapter draws on these books along with the articles by John Stachel; Arthur I. Miller; Robert Rynasiewicz; John D. Norton; John