EINSTEIN S MIRACULOUS YEAR: FIVE PAPERS THAT CHANGED THE FACE OF PHYSICS

"It is particularly remarkable that a single physicist--Albert Einstein--has such extraordinarily deep perceptions of the workings of Nature that he laid foundation stones of . . .[the] twentieth-century revolutions [in physics] in the single year of 1905."--From the foreword by Roger Penrose, Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford After 1905, Einstein''s miraculous year, physics would never be the same again. In those twelve months, Einstein shattered many cherished scientific beliefs with five extraordinary papers that would establish him as the world''s leading physicist. This book brings those papers together in an accessible format. The best-known papers are the two that founded special relativity: "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" and "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?" In the former, Einstein showed that absolute time had to be replaced by a new absolute: the speed of light. In the second, he asserted the equivalence of mass and energy, which would lead to the famous formula "E = mc2," The book also includes "On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light," in which Einstein challenged the wave theory of light, suggesting that light could also be regarded as a collection of particles. This helped to open the door to a whole new world--that of quantum physics. For ideas in this paper, he won the Nobel Prize in 1921.