Einstein's Masterwork by John Gribbin

Author:John Gribbin [Gribbin, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Footnotes

a The story that in later life he gave up wearing socks so as not to have the bother of finding clean ones to wear is true, and typical.

b This number is called Avogadro’s ‘constant’ today, but we shall stick with the name familiar in Einstein’s day.

c Remember that what matters is not so much the number on the front, 0.5 or 2.1, as the agreement of the number of ‘powers of ten’ in the exponent, 23.

d You sometimes see slightly different versions of the titles of Einstein’s papers. The titles and quotes from Einstein’s papers that are used here, are taken from Stachel, which is the most accessible source.

e All of this works for other solutions as well, of course, but we shall stick with sugar and water because that was the example Einstein used in his dissertation.

f A white-hot object looks white because the peak of its spectrum is in the middle of the rainbow of colours; so it radiates all the colours, which combine to make white light. If it were even hotter, it would look blue, as some stars do.

g His equation was later refined by James Jeans and became known as the Rayleigh-Jeans law.

h Incidentally, this is exactly what astronomers do now ‘see’, using sensitive detectors called charge-coupled devices, when they point their telescopes towards the faintest and most distant objects in the Universe. They can literally count the photons arriving one by one.

i Deliciously, while J.J. Thomson received the Nobel Prize for ‘proving’ that electrons are particles, his son George received the Nobel Prize for ‘proving’ that electrons are waves. They were both right.

j The genesis of the Special Theory was described by Einstein in a lecture in Japan, in 1922; the lecture was reprinted in Physics Today in August 1982.

k Of course, the ‘Special Theory’ paper was not known by that name at the time; Einstein introduced the name in 1915, to distinguish it from his General Theory of Relativity. But I will use the name, since, as with the ‘Brownian motion’ paper, we have the benefit of hindsight. I emphasise that ‘Special’ in this context means the theory is a ‘special case’ dealing only with objects travelling at constant velocities; the General Theory deals with accelerations as well. But I reiterate that it is always ‘Special Theory of Relativity;’ there is no such thing as the ‘theory of special relativity,’ since it is the theory that is ‘special’ not the relativity!

l Indeed, for some time after his paper had been published on the other side of the Atlantic, Fitzgerald himself didn’t know that it had appeared in print.

m Again, with a different meaning from what ‘ion’ means to a scientist today.

n Shortly before he died, Einstein told his biographer Carl Seelig that in 1905 he knew about Lorentz’s work of 1895, but not about his later work or Poincaré’s contributions. This may be an exaggeration, but he probably had not actually read Lorentz’s 1904 paper, since the Proceedings of the Amsterdam Academy were not exactly easy to get hold of in Bern.

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