Leonardo Digital Reviews

Einstein's Miraculous Year: Five Papers that Changed the Face of Physics

edited and introduced by John Stachel
1998, Princeton, Princeton UP

Reviewed by David Topper

In 1905 Albert Einstein published in the German journal Annalen der Physik four papers that revolutionized the physics of our century. As well, he delivered his Ph.D. dissertation to the University of Zurich. These five remarkable works, reprinted (in English translation) in this marvelous book on Einstein's "miraculous year," constitute an introduction to 20th century physics.

Einstein's dissertation was on a new method of determining molecular dimensions (using liquids instead of, say, gases). His paper on Brownian motion (the second in this book) gave further evidence for measuring molecules - at a time when the existence of atoms was still seriously questioned. The third section of the book contains the two papers on what later was called the "special theory of relativity"; the second paper concluded with the equivalence of energy and mass, later written as E=mc2 .

In the last paper, Einstein put forth his quantum (later photon) theory of light, which he considered at the time to be his most revolutionary idea. The ordering of these five papers in four sections is not according to their chronological publication but rather in terms of their innovative nature--hence the quantum theory of light is last.

The reprints are supplemented with valuable introductory essays for each section and a superb 25 page introductory essay to the book. Reading these essay alone provides the reader with a succinct discussion of Einstein's scientific life around 1905. However, I should emphasize that these essays are not for the "lay reader," although I'm sure such a reader familiar with the fundamentals of physics could follow most of the discussion. Much information is based on recent research on Einstein as well as the documents on his early life that have been recovered by the Einstein Papers Project, the goal of which is the publication of Einstein's complete works; at present, the Project is up to volume 8 (1914-1918). John Stachel was an early editor of the Project; indeed this book is an extraction from The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 2, the Swiss Years: Writings, 1900-1909, which he edited. Accordingly the introductory essays in the book are abridged versions of those appearing in the Collected Papers.

Perhaps I should point out that these are not the first English translations of Einstein's four famous papers. Dover Publications has reprinted the two 1905 relativity papers (and more) in The Principle of Relativity and the Brownian motion paper (and more) in Investigations on the Theory of Brownian Movement. The latter also contains Einstein's published version of his Ph.D. dissertation from the Annalen der Physik (1906). The light quantum paper has been published in several places: the American Journal of Physics, vol.33, #5 (May, 1965), 367-374, and in H. A. Boorse & L. Motz (eds.), The World of the Atom (NY: Basic Books, 1966), 544-557. Finally, Arthur I. Miller published his translation of the first relativity paper his book, Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1981), pp. 370-393, which contains several valuable footnotes. Nevertheless, I suspect that the translations in Stachel's book (namely, from Volume 2 of the Collected Papers) will be the authoritative ones for years to come.

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