Was Einstein's job as a patent-clerk a prestigious, high-paying job?
hello
a programmer?
How did Einstein develop this theory when his formal educational and
informal educational background wasn't that profound?
Sam Wormley
Einstein was a smart feller and saw thing differently than others.
Miraculous Year (1905)
Poincaré & Einstein
Ref: "EINSTEIN 1905", John S. Rigden, Harvard University Press (2005)
In his 1902 book "La Science Et L'hypothèse", the
mathematical physicist Henri Poincaré? identified three
fundamental yet unresolved problems [in physics].
One problem concerned the mysterious way ultraviolet
light ejects electrons from the surface of a metal;
the second problem was the zig-zagging perpetual motion
of pollen particles suspended in a liquid;
the third problem was the failure of experiments to
detect Earth's motion through the aether.
In 1904, Einstein read Poincaré's book. He had also been
thinking about these problems, independently of Poincaré.
For Einstein, they were clearly part of God's thoughts.
One year later, in 1905, he solved all three.
_______________________
Ref: http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/18/1/2/1
Adapted from "Five papers that shook the world"
by Matthew Chalmers
January 2005
Most physicists would be happy to make one discovery that
is important enough to be taught to future generations of
physics students. Only a very small number manage this in
their lifetime, and even fewer make two appearances in
the textbooks.
But Einstein was different. In little more than eight
months in 1905 he completed five papers that would change
the world for ever. Spanning three quite distinct topics
- relativity, the photoelectric effect and Brownian
motion - Einstein overturned our view of space and time,
showed that it is insufficient to describe light purely
as a wave, and laid the foundations for the discovery of
atoms.
Genius at work
Perhaps even more remarkably, Einstein's 1905 papers were
based neither on hard experimental evidence nor
sophisticated mathematics. Instead, he presented elegant
arguments and conclusions based on physical intuition.
"Einstein's work stands out not because it was difficult
but because nobody at that time had been thinking the way
he did," says Gerard 't Hooft of the University of
Utrecht, who shared the 1999 Nobel Prize for Physics for
his work in quantum theory.
"Dirac, Fermi, Feynman and others also made multiple
contributions to physics, but Einstein made the world
realize, for the first time, that pure thought can change
our understanding of nature."
And just in case the enormity of Einstein's achievement
is in any doubt, we have to remember that he did all of
this in his "spare time".
Statistical revelations
In 1905 Einstein was married with a one-year-old son and
working as a patent examiner in Bern in Switzerland. His
passion was physics, but he had been unable to find an
academic position after graduating from the ETH in Zurich
in 1900.
Nevertheless, he had managed to publish five papers in
the leading German journal Annalen der Physik between
1900 and 1904, and had also submitted an unsolicited
thesis on molecular forces to the University of Zurich,
which was rejected.
Most of these early papers were concerned with the
reality of atoms and molecules, something that was far
from certain at the time. But on 17 March in 1905 - three
days after his 26th birthday - Einstein submitted a paper
titled "A heuristic point of view concerning the
production and transformation of light" to Annalen der
Physik.
Einstein suggested that, from a thermodynamic
perspective, light can be described as if it consists of
independent quanta of energy (Ann. Phys., Lpz 17
132-148).
This hypothesis, which had been tentatively proposed by
Max Planck a few years earlier, directly challenged the
deeply ingrained wave picture of light. However, Einstein
was able to use the idea to explain certain puzzles about
the way that light or other electromagnetic radiation
ejected electrons from a metal via the photoelectric
effect.
Maxwell's electrodynamics could not, for example, explain
why the energy of the ejected photoelectrons depended
only on the frequency of the incident light and not on
the intensity. However, this phenomenon was easy to
understand if light of a certain frequency actually
consisted of discrete packets or photons all with the
same energy.
Einstein would go on to receive the 1921 Nobel Prize for
Physics for this work, although the official citation
stated that the prize was also awarded "for his services
to theoretical physics".
"The arguments Einstein used in the photoelectric and
subsequent radiation theory are staggering in their
boldness and beauty," says Frank Wilczek, a theorist at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who shared the
2004 Nobel Prize for Physics.
"He put forward revolutionary ideas that both inspired
decisive experimental work and helped launch quantum
theory." Although not fully appreciated at the time,
Einstein's work on the quantum nature of light was the
first step towards establishing the wave-particle duality
of quantum particles.
On 30 April, one month before his paper on the
photoelectric effect appeared in print, Einstein
completed his second 1905 paper, in which he showed how
to calculate Avogadro's number and the size of molecules
by studying their motion in a solution.
This article was accepted as a doctoral thesis by the
University of Zurich in July, and published in a slightly
altered form in Annalen der Physik in January 1906.
Despite often being obscured by the fame of his papers on
special relativity and the photoelectric effect,
Einstein's thesis on molecular dimensions became one of
his most quoted works.
Indeed, it was his preoccupation with statistical
mechanics that formed the basis of several of his
breakthroughs, including the idea that light was
quantized.
After finishing a doctoral thesis, most physicists would
be either celebrating or sleeping. But just 11 days later
Einstein sent another paper to Annalen der Physik, this
time on the subject of Brownian motion.
In this paper, "On the movement of small particles
suspended in stationary liquids required by the
molecular-kinetic theory of heat", Einstein combined
kinetic theory and classical hydrodynamics to derive an
equation that showed that the displacement of Brownian
particles varies as the square root of time (Ann. Phys.,
Lpz 17 549-560).
This was confirmed experimentally by Jean Perrin three
years later, proving once and for all that atoms do
exist. In fact, Einstein extended his theory of Brownian
motion in an additional paper that he sent to the journal
on 19 December, although this was not published until
February 1906.
A special discovery
Shortly after finishing his paper on Brownian motion
Einstein had an idea about synchronizing clocks that were
spatially separated.
_______________________
Adapted from "The Mechanical Universe"
Episode 43: Velocity and Time
In the 1800s Michael Faraday discovered, or I should say
formalized, electromagnetic induction. Given a coil of
wire and a bar magnet...
F = qE + qv x B
Holding the coil stationary and moving the bar magnet
produced an electric current in the coil. Similarly
holding the bar magnet stationary and moving the coil
also produced an electric current in the coil.
But in the language of electrodynamics of the day the two
cases were distinct independent phenomena that had
completely different explanations.
When Albert Einstein saw that, he said "Look guys, you've
just got to be kidding--Any yo-yo can see that these are
the same thing".
So it was this little experiment that was really the
start of relativity, not the Michelson-Morley
Experiment--not some exotic experiment to detect the
motion of the earth through the aether.
With this simple little phenomenon, that of course
everybody knew about, disturbed nobody else, but Albert
Einstein.
This led him to write a paper that landed on the desks of
Annalen der Physik on 30 June, and would go on to
completely overhaul our understanding of space and time.
Some 30 pages long and containing no references, his
fourth 1905 paper was titled "On the electrodynamics of
moving bodies" (Ann. Phys., Lpz 17 891-921).
In the 200 or so years before 1905, physics had been
built on Newton's laws of motion, which were known to
hold equally well in stationary reference frames and in
frames moving at a constant velocity in a straight line.
Provided the correct "Galilean" rules were applied, one
could therefore transform the laws of physics so that
they did not depend on the frame of reference.
However, the theory of electrodynamics developed by
Maxwell in the late 19th century posed a fundamental
problem to this "principle of relativity" because it
suggested that electromagnetic waves always travel at the
same speed.
Either electrodynamics was wrong or there had to be some
kind of stationary "ether" through which the waves could
propagate.
_______________________
I just want to read to you the first two paragraphs of
Einsteins 4th paper...
ON THE ELECTRODYNAMICS OF MOVING BODIES
By A. Einstein
June 30, 1905
It is known that Maxwell's electrodynamics--as usually
understood at the present time--when applied to moving
bodies, leads to asymmetries which do not appear to be
inherent in the phenomena.
Take, for example, the reciprocal electrodynamic action
of a magnet and a conductor. The observable phenomenon
here depends only on the relative motion of the conductor
and the magnet, whereas the customary view draws a sharp
distinction between the two cases in which either the one
or the other of these bodies is in motion. For if the
magnet is in motion and the conductor at rest, there
arises in the neighbourhood of the magnet an electric
field with a certain definite energy, producing a current
at the places where parts of the conductor are situated.
But if the magnet is stationary and the conductor in
motion, no electric field arises in the neighbourhood of
the magnet. In the conductor, however, we find an
electromotive force, to which in itself there is no
corresponding energy, but which gives rise--assuming
equality of relative motion in the two cases
discussed--to electric currents of the same path and
intensity as those produced by the electric forces in the
former case.
Examples of this sort, together with the unsuccessful
attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively
to the "light medium," suggest that the phenomena of
electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no
properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest.
They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to (1)
the first order of small quantities, the same laws of
electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames
of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold
good. We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which
will hereafter be called the ``Principle of Relativity'')
to the status of a postulate,
and also introduce another postulate, which is only (2)
apparently irreconcilable with the former, namely, that
light is always propagated in empty space with a definite
velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of
the emitting body.
These two postulates suffice for the attainment of a
simple and consistent theory of the electrodynamics of
moving bodies based on Maxwell's theory for stationary
bodies.
The introduction of a "luminiferous ether" will prove
to be superfluous inasmuch as the view here to be
developed will not require an "absolutely stationary
space" provided with special properties, nor assign a
velocity-vector to a point of the empty space in which
electromagnetic processes take place.
And, of course the paper goes on to develop the ideas
and make his case...
_______________________
True to style, Einstein
swept away the concept of the ether (which, in any case,
had not been detected experimentally) in one audacious
step. He postulated that no matter how fast you are
moving, light will always appear to travel at the same
velocity: the speed of light is a fundamental constant of
nature that cannot be exceeded.
Combined with the requirement that the laws of physics
are the identical in all "inertial" (i.e.
non-accelerating) frames, Einstein built a completely new
theory of motion that revealed Newtonian mechanics to be
an approximation that only holds at low, everyday
speeds.
The theory later became known as the special theory of
relativity - special because it applies only to
non-accelerating frames - and led to the realization that
space and time are intimately linked to one another.
In order that the two postulates of special relativity
are respected, strange things have to happen to space and
time, which, unbeknown to Einstein, had been predicted by
Lorentz and others the previous year.
For instance, the length of an object becomes shorter
when it travels at a constant velocity, and a moving
clock runs slower than a stationary clock.
Effects like these have been verified in countless
experiments over the last 100 years, but in 1905 the most
famous prediction of Einstein's theory was still to come.
After a short family holiday in Serbia, Einstein
submitted his fifth and final paper of 1905 on 27
September. Just three pages long and titled "Does the
inertia of a body depend on its energy content?", this
paper presented an "afterthought" on the consequences of
special relativity, which culminated in a simple equation
that is now known as E = mc^2 (Ann. Phys., Lpz 18
639-641).
This equation, which was to become the most famous in all
of science, was the icing on the cake.
"The special theory of relativity, culminating in the
prediction that mass and energy can be converted into one
another, is one of the greatest achievements in physics -
or anything else for that matter," says Wilczek.
"Einstein's work on Brownian motion would have merited a
sound Nobel prize, the photoelectric effect a strong
Nobel prize, but special relativity and E = mc^2 were
worth a super-strong Nobel prize."
However, while not doubting the scale of Einstein's
achievements, many physicists also think that his 1905
discoveries would have eventually been made by others.
"If Einstein had not lived, people would have stumbled on
for a number of years, maybe a decade or so, before
getting a clear conception of special relativity," says
Ed Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton.
't Hooft agrees. "The more natural course of events would
have been that Einstein's 1905 discoveries were made by
different people, not by one and the same person," he
says. However, most think that it would have taken much
longer - perhaps a few decades - for Einstein's general
theory of relativity to emerge.
Indeed, Wilczek points out that one consequence of
general relativity being so far ahead of its time was
that the subject languished for many years afterwards.
The aftermath
By the end of 1905 Einstein was starting to make a name
for himself in the physics community, with Planck and
Philipp Lenard - who won the Nobel prize that year -
among his most famous supporters. Indeed, Planck was a
member of the editorial board of Annalen der Physik at
the time.
Einstein was finally given the title of Herr Doktor from
the University of Zurich in January 1906, but he remained
at the patent office for a further two and a half years
before taking up his first academic position at Zurich.
By this time his statistical interpretation of Brownian
motion and his bold postulates of special relativity were
becoming part of the fabric of physics, although it would
take several more years for his paper on light quanta to
gain wide acceptance.
1905 was undoubtedly a great year for physics, and for
Einstein. "You have to go back to quasi-mythical figures
like Galileo or especially Newton to find good
analogues," says Wilczek.
"The closest in modern times might be Dirac, who, if
magnetic monopoles had been discovered, would have given
Einstein some real competition!" But we should not forget
that 1905 was just the beginning of Einstein's legacy.
His crowning achievement - the general theory of
relativity - was still to come.
Androcles
"hello" <hpi...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:795d8726-809b-4882...@t20g2000yqe.googlegroups.com...
The German equivalent of "The National Enquirer" published his idiocy.
