No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
The core of this volume is formed by four chapters (2–5) with detailed reconstructions of the arguments and derivations in four of Einstein's most important papers, the three main papers of his annus mirabilis 1905 (on the light quantum, Brownian motion, and special relativity) and his first systematic exposition of general relativity of 1916. The derivations are given in sufficient detail and in sufficiently modernized notation (without any serious distortion of the originals) for an undergraduate physics major to read and understand them with far less effort than it would take him or her to understand (English translations of) Einstein's original papers. Each of these four papers is accompanied by a detailed introduction, which covers the conceptual development of the relevant field prior to Einstein's contribution to it and corrects some of the myths surrounding these papers that still have not been fully eradicated among physicists. (One quibble: though Kennedy correctly points out that the goal of the light quantum paper was not to explain the photoelectric effect, it is also not quite right to say that 'it was written to explain the Wien region of blackbody radiation' (p. xv). Einstein used this explanatory feat as the central argument for his light quantum hypothesis.) These four chapters then are the most valuable part of the volume. They could be used, independently of one another, but preferably in conjunction with Einstein's original texts, in courses on quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, electrodynamics, and general relativity, respectively, to add a historical component to such courses. As a historian of science embedded in a physics department who is regularly called upon to give guest lectures in such courses on the history of their subjects, I can highly recommend the volume for this purpose. However, I would not adopt this volume as (one of) the central text(s) for a course on the history of modern physics. For one thing, chapter 1, which in just 26 pages (not counting six pages of notes and references) covers everything from Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton to Maxwell and Lorentz to Einstein's early biography to a cardboard version of Popper versus Kuhn, is too superficial to be useful for such a course. To a lesser extent, this is also true for chapter 6, which compresses the development of quantum theory after Einstein's 1905 paper into 20 pages (plus seven pages of notes and references) and for chapter 7, a brief epilogue. However, this is not my main worry. One could easily supplement or even replace the bookends of the volume with other richer sources and use this volume mainly for its excellent detailed commentaries on some Einstein classics in the four chapters in between. My more serious reservation about the use of the volume as a whole in a history of physics course, ironically, comes from the exact same feature that made me whole-heartedly recommend its core chapters for physics courses. This is especially true for the chapters on special and general relativity. How useful is it for a student to go through, in as much detail as this volume provides, the Lorentz transformation of Maxwell's equations in vector form? I can see how a student in an E&M class (with a section on special relativity) might benefit from this exercise. The clumsiness of the calculations in vector form by Lorentz and Einstein could help a student encountering Maxwell's equations in tensor form for the first time appreciate the advantages of the latter formalism. Similarly, it would be useful for a student in a GR class to go through the basics of tensor calculus in the old-fashioned but not inelegant mathematical introduction of Einstein's 1916 review article on general relativity. This could reinforce mastery of material that a student in a GR class will have to learn anyway (though Einstein's presentation of the mathematics of both special and general relativity in The Meaning of Relativity would seem to be more suitable for these purposes). It is not so clear what benefit a student in a history of physics course rather than a E&M course or a GR course would derive from the exhaustive coverage of the papers on special and general relativity in this volume. In the case of the history of special relativity, it would seem to make sense to leave out the details of the Lorentz transformation of Maxwell's equations to make room for a discussion, even if only qualitatively, of Minkowski's four-dimensional formalism and Minkowski diagrams. In the case of the history of general relativity, coverage of tensor calculus could profitably be curtailed to make room for discussion of how Einstein found his field equations or how GR failed to make all motion relative. Chapter 3 on Brownian motion also contains its share of detailed calculations that may be useful for students in a class on Stat Mech but not for those in a class on history of physics. Chapter 2 on the light quantum paper does not suffer from this problem. However, whereas the other three papers covered in detail in the volume can serve as representative of Einstein's broader efforts in those fields, the light quantum paper is only the first in a series of remarkable contributions that Einstein made to early quantum theory. Several of these contributions (specific heat, wave-particle duality, stimulated emission, Bose--Einstein statistics) are covered very briefly in chapter 6. I would have liked to see a presentation of Einstein's 1917 derivation of the Planck law for the spectral distribution of black-body radiation with the famous A and B coefficients as detailed and as easy to follow as many less important derivations in the chapters on relativity and Brownian motion. This derivation is much easier yet much more illuminating than, say, the original proofs of the Lorentz invariance of Maxwell's equations. I hope the author will consider such changes in emphasis for a second edition, for his reconstructions and commentaries certainly do open up these four classic Einstein papers to interested undergraduates in physics and other disciplines in ways that the scholarly literature on Einstein does not.
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.