Aug 30 2007

Special Relativity

Published by at 12:45 pm under General

It was in Albert Einstein’s 1905 paper “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy-Content?” that he revealed E = mc2.  It was a follow-up to his “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” the same year.  The follow-up contains the words, in English translation, near the end: “Moreover, the difference K0 – K1, like the kinetic energy of the electron, depends on the velocity.”  Then, at the very end it says: “If the theory corresponds to the facts, radiation conveys inertia between the emitting and absorbing bodies.”
Was Einstein close to figuring out gravity?  The Bohr model of the atom was still a few years away, but by that time Einstein was thinking General Relativity and warped space time.

One response so far

One Response to “Special Relativity”

  1. Kevinon 25 Oct 2007 at 6:01 pm

    “The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist. I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me.”       – Albert Einstein

    Reading Einstein’s 1905 papers, it seems evident to me that he was, at least in his 20’s, first and foremost a mathematician. The same could be said about Max Planck, due to the way he fixed the blackbody radiation law when the ultraviolet catastrophe was a problem.

    Here is another Einstein quote which I hope proves my first point:

    “The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry, and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.”

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