Einstein: His Life and Universe

  17. Dudley Herschbach, “Einstein as a Student,” Mar. 2005, unpublished paper provided to the author.

  18. Einstein to Mileva Mari, Apr. 15, Apr. 30, 1901; Mileva Mari to Helene Savi, Dec. 20, 1900.

  19. Einstein to G. Wessler, Aug. 24, 1948, AEA 59-26.

  20. Maja Einstein, sketch, 19; Reiser, 63; minutes of the Municipal Naturalization Commission of Zurich, Dec. 14, 1900, CPAE 1: 84; Report of the Schweitzerisches Informationsbureau, Jan. 30, 1901, CPAE 1: 88; Military Service Book, Mar. 13, 1901, CPAE 1: 91.

  21. Mileva Mari to Helene Savi, Dec. 20, 1900; Einstein to Mileva Mari, Mar. 23, Mar. 27, 1901.

  22. Einstein to Mileva Mari, Apr. 4, 1901.

  23. Einstein to Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Apr. 12, 1901; Einstein to Marcel Grossmann, Apr. 14, 1901; Fölsing, 78; Clark, 66; Miller 2001, 68.

  24. Einstein to Wilhelm Ostwald, Mar. 19, Apr. 3, 1901.

  25. Hermann Einstein to Wilhelm Ostwald, Apr. 13, 1901.

  26. Einstein to Mileva Mari, Mar. 23, Mar. 27, 1901; Einstein to Marcel Grossmann, Apr. 14, 1901.

  27. Einstein to Mileva Mari, Mar. 27, 1901; Mileva Mari to Helene Savi, Dec. 9, 1901.

  28. Einstein to Mileva Mari, Apr. 4, 1901; Einstein to Michele Besso, June 23, 1918; Overbye, 25; Miller 2001, 78; Fölsing, 115.

  29. Einstein to Mileva Mari, Mar. 27, Apr. 4, 1901.

  30. Einstein to Marcel Grossmann, Apr. 14, 1901; Einstein to Mileva Mari, Apr. 15, 1901.

  31. Einstein to Mileva Mari, Apr. 30, 1901. The official translation is “blue nightshirt,” but the word that Einstein actually used, Schlafrock , translates more accurately as “dressing gown.”

  32. Mileva Mari to Einstein, May 2, 1901.

  33. Mileva Mari to Helene Savi, second half of May, 1901.

  34. Einstein to Mileva Mari, second half of May, 1901.

  35. Einstein to Mileva Mari, tentatively dated in CPAE as May 28?, 1901. The actual date is probably a week or so later.

  36. Overbye, 77–78.

  37. Einstein to Mileva Mari, July 7, 1901.

  38. Mileva Mari to Einstein, after July 7, 1901 (published in CPAE vol. 8 as 1: 116, because it was discovered after vol. 1 had been printed).

  39. Mileva Mari to Einstein, ca. July 31, 1901; Highfield and Carter, 80.

  40. Einstein to Jost Winteler, July 8, 1901; Einstein to Marcel Grossmann, Apr. 14, 1901. The comparison to the compass needle comes from Overbye, 65.

  41. Renn 2005a, 109. Jürgen Renn is the director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and an editor of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. I am grateful to him for help with this topic.

  42. Einstein to Mileva Mari, Apr. 15, 1901; Einstein to Marcel Grossmann, Apr. 15, 1901.

  43. Renn 2005a, 124.

  44. Einstein to Mileva Mari, Apr. 4, ca. June 4, 1901. The letters to and from Drude no longer exist, so it is not known precisely what Einstein’s objections were.

  45. Einstein to Mileva Mari, ca. July 7, 1901; Einstein to Jost Winteler, July 8, 1901.

  46. Renn 2005a, 118. Renn’s source notes say, “I gratefully acknowledge the kindness of Mr. Felix de Marez Oyens, from Christie’s, who pointed my attention to the missing page of the letter by Einstein to Mileva Mari, ca. 8 July 1901. As, unfortunately, no copy of the page is available to me, my interpretation had to be based on a raw transcription of the passage in question.”

  47. Einstein to Marcel Grossmann, Sept. 6, 1901.

  48. Overbye, 82–84. This includes a good synopsis of the Boltzmann-Ostwald dispute.

  49. Einstein, “On the Thermodynamic Theory of the Difference in Potentials between Metals and Fully Dissociated Solutions of Their Salts,” Apr. 1902. Renn does not mention this paper in his analysis of Einstein’s dispute with Drude, and instead focuses only on the June 1902 paper.

  50. Einstein, “Kinetic Theory of Thermal Equilibrium and the Second Law of Thermodynamics,” June 1902; Renn 2005a, 119; Jos Uffink, “Insuperable Difficulties: Einstein’s Statistical Road to Molecular Physics,”Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 37 (2006): 38; Clayton Gearhart, “Einstein before 1905: The Early Papers on Statistical Mechanics,”American Journal of Physics (May 1990): 468.

  51. Mileva Mari to Helene Savi, ca. Nov. 23, 1901; Einstein to Mileva Mari, Nov. 28, 1901.

  52. Einstein to Mileva Mari, Dec. 17 and 19, 1901.

  53. Receipt for the return of Doctoral Fees, Feb. 1, 1902, CPAE 1: 132; Fölsing, 88–90; Reiser, 69; Overbye, 91. From Einstein to Mileva Mari, ca. Feb. 8, 1902: “I’m explaining to [Conrad] Habicht the paper I submitted to Kleiner. He’s very enthusiastic about my good ideas and is pestering me to send Boltzmann the part of the paper which relates to his book. I’m going to do it.”

  54. Einstein to Marcel Grossmann, Sept. 6, 1901.

  55. Einstein to Mileva Mari, Nov. 28, 1901.

  56. Mileva Mari to Einstein, Nov. 13, 1901; Highfield and Carter, 82.

  57. Einstein to Mileva Mari, Dec. 12, 1901; Fölsing, 107; Zackheim, 35; High-field and Carter, 86.

  58. Pauline Einstein to Pauline Winteler, Feb. 20, 1902.

  59. Mileva Mari to Helene Savi, ca. Nov. 23, 1901.

  60. Einstein to Mileva Mari, Dec. 11 and 19, 1901.

  61. Einstein to Mileva Mari, Dec. 28, 1901.

  62. Einstein to Mileva Mari, Feb. 4, 1902, Dec. 12, 1901.

  63. Einstein to Mileva Mari, Feb. 4, 1902.

  64. Mileva Mari to Einstein, Nov. 13, 1901. For some context, see Popovi, which includes a collection of letters between Mari and Savi collected by Savi’s grandson.

  65. Einstein to Mileva Mari, Feb. 17, 1902.

  66. Swiss Federal Council to Einstein, June 19, 1902.

  67. See Peter Galison’s treatment of the synchronization of time in Europe at that period, in Galison, 222–248. Also, see chapter 6 below for a fuller discussion of the role this might have played in Einstein’s development of special relativity.

  68. Einstein to Hans Wohlwend, autumn 1902; Fölsing, 102.

  69. Einstein interview, Bucky, 28; Reiser, 66.

  70. Einstein to Michele Besso, Dec. 12, 1919.

  71. Einstein interview, Bucky, 28; Einstein 1956, 12. Both say essentially the same thing, with variations in wording and translation. Reiser, 64.

  72. Alas, as a rule, all applications were destroyed after eighteen years, and even though Einstein was by then world-famous, his comments on inventions were disposed of during the 1920s; Fölsing, 104.

  73. Galison, 243; Flückiger, 27.

  74. Fölsing, 103; C. P. Snow, “Einstein,” in Goldsmith et al., 7.

  75. Einstein interview, Bucky, 28; Einstein 1956, 12. See Don Howard, “A kind of vessel in which the struggle for eternal truth is played out,” AEA Cedex-H.

  76. Solovine, 6.

  77. Maurice Solovine, Dedication of the Olympia Academy, “A.D. 1903,” CPAE 2: 3.

  78. Solovine, 11–14.

  79. Einstein to Maurice Solovine, Nov. 25, 1948; Seelig 1956a, 57; Einstein to Conrad Habicht and Maurice Solovine, Apr. 3, 1953; Hoffmann 1972, 243.

  80. The editors of Einstein’s papers, in the introduction to vol. 2, xxiv–xxv, describe the books and specific editions read by the Olympia Academy.

  81. Einstein to Moritz Schlick, Dec. 14, 1915. In a 1944 essay about Bertrand Russell, Einstein wrote, “Hume’s clear message seemed crushing: the sensory raw material, the only source of our knowledge, through habit may lead us to belief and expectation but not to the knowledge and still less to the understanding of lawful relations.” Einstein 1954, 22. See also Einstein, 1949b, 13.

  82. David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature , book 1, part 2; Norton 2005a.

  83. There are varying interpretations of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781). I have tried here to stick closely to Einstein’s own view of Kant. Einstein, “Re-marks on Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Knowledge,” (1944) in Schilpp; Einstein 1954, 22; Einstein, 1949b, 11–13; Einstein, “On the Methods of Theoretical Physics,” the Herbert S
pencer lecture, Oxford, June 10, 1933, in Einstein 1954, 270; Mara Beller, “Kant’s Impact on Einstein’s Thought,” in Howard and Stachel 2000, 83–106. See also Einstein, “Physics and Reality” (1936) in Einstein 1950a, 62; Yehuda Elkana, “The Myth of Simplicity,” in Holton and Elkana, 221.

  84. Einstein 1949b, 21.

  85. Einstein, Obituary for Ernst Mach, Mar. 14, 1916, CPAE 6: 26.

  86. Philipp Frank, “Einstein, Mach and Logical Positivism,” in Schilpp, 272; Overbye, 25, 100–104; Gerald Holton, “Mach, Einstein and the Search for Reality,”Daedalus (spring 1968): 636–673, reprinted in Holton 1973, 221; Clark, 61; Einstein to Carl Seelig, Apr. 8, 1952; Einstein, 1949b, 15; Norton 2005a.

  87. Spinoza, Ethics, part I, proposition 29 and passim; Jammer 1999, 47; Holton 2003, 26–34; Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic (New York: Norton, 2006).

  88. Pais 1982, 47; Fölsing, 106; Hoffmann 1972, 39; Maja Einstein, xvii; Overbye, 15–17.

  89. Marriage Certificate, CPAE 5: 6; Miller 2001, 64; Zackheim, 47.

  90. Einstein to Michele Besso, Jan. 22, 1903; Mileva Mari to Helene Savi, Mar. 1903; Solovine, 13; Seelig 1956a, 46; Einstein to Carl Seelig, May 5, 1952; AEA 39-20.

  91. Mileva Mari to Einstein, Aug. 27, 1903; Zackheim, 50.

  92. Einstein to Mileva Mari, ca. Sept. 19, 1903; Zackheim; Popovi; author’s discussions and e-mails with Robert Schulmann.

  93. Popovi, 11; Zackheim, 276; author’s discussions and e-mails with Robert Schulmann.

  94. Michelmore, 42.

  95. Einstein to Mileva Mari, ca. Sept. 19, 1903.

  96. Mileva Mari to Helene Savi, June 14, 1904; Popovi, 86; Whitrow, 19.

  97. Overbye, 113, citing Desanka Trbuhovic-Gjuric, Im Schatten Albert Einstein (Bern: Verlag Paul Haupt, 1993), 94.

  CHAPTER FIVE: THE MIRACLE YEAR

  1. This quote is attributed in a variety of books and sources to an address Lord Kelvin gave to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1900. I have not found direct evidence for it, which is why I qualify it as “reportedly” said. It is not in the two-volume biography by Silvanus P. Thompson, The Life of Lord Kelvin (New York: Chelsea Publishing, 1976), originally published in 1910.

  2. Pierre-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1820; reprinted, New York: Dover, 1951). This famous statement of determinism comes in the preface of a work devoted to probability theory. The fuller line is that in ultimate reality we have determinism, but in practice we have probabilities. The achievement of full knowledge is not reachable, he says, so we need probabilities.

  3. Einstein, Letter to the Royal Society on Newton’s bicentennial, Mar. 1927.

  4. Einstein 1949b, 19.

  5. For the influence of Faraday’s induction theories on Einstein, see Miller 1981, chapter 3.

  6. Einstein and Infeld, 244; Overbye, 40; Bernstein 1996a, 49.

  7. Einstein to Conrad Habicht, May 18 or 25, 1905.

  8. Sent on Mar. 17, 1905, and published in Annalen der Physik 17 (1905). I want to thank Yale professor Douglas Stone for help with this section.

  9. Max Born, obituary for Max Planck, Royal Society of London, 1948.

  10. John Heilbron, The Dilemmas of an Upright Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Lucid explanations of Einstein’s quantum paper, from which this section is drawn, include Gribbin and Gribbin; Bernstein 1996a, 2006; Overbye, 118–121; Stachel 1998; Rigden; A. Douglas Stone, “Genius and Genius2: Planck, Einstein and the Birth of Quantum Theory,” Aspen Center for Physics, unpublished lecture, July 20, 2005.

  11. Planck’s approach was probably a bit more complex and involved assuming a group of oscillators and positing a total energy that is an integer multiple of a quantum unit. Bernstein 2006, 157–161.

  12. Max Planck, speech to the Berlin Physical Society, Dec. 14, 1900. See Light-man 2005, 3.

  13. Einstein 1949b, 46. Miller 1984, 112; Miller 1999, 50; Rynasiewicz and Renn, 5.

  14. Einstein, “On the General Molecular Theory of Heat,” Mar. 27, 1904.

  15. Einstein to Conrad Habicht, Apr. 15, 1904. Jeremy Bernstein discussed the connections between the 1904 and 1905 papers in an e-mail, July 29, 2005.

  16. Einstein, “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light,” Mar. 17, 1905.

  17. “We are startled, wondering what happened to the waves of light of the 19th century theory and marveling at how Einstein could see the signature of atomic discreteness in the bland formulae of thermodynamics,” says the science historian John D. Norton. “Einstein takes what looks like a dreary fragment of the thermodynamics of heat radiation, an empirically based expression for the entropy of a volume of high-frequency heat radiation. In a few deft inferences he converts this expression into a simple, probabilistic formula whose unavoidable interpretation is that the energy of radiation is spatially localized in finitely many, independent points.” Norton 2006c, 73. See also Lightman 2005, 48.

  18. Einstein’s paper in 1906 noted clearly that Planck had not grasped the full implications of the quantum theory. Apparently, Besso encouraged Einstein not to make this criticism of Planck too explicit. As Besso wrote much later, “In helping you edit your publications on the quanta, I deprived you of a part of your glory, but, on the other hand, I made a friend for you in Planck.” Michele Besso to Einstein, Jan. 17, 1928. See Rynasiewicz and Renn, 29; Bernstein 1991, 155.

  19. Holton and Brush, 395.

  20. Gilbert Lewis coined the name “photon” in 1926. Einstein in 1905 discovered a quantum of light. Only later, in 1916, did he discuss the quantum’s momentum and its zero rest mass. Jeremy Bernstein has noted that one of the most interesting discoveries Einstein did not make in 1905 was the photon. Jeremy Bernstein, letter to the editor, Physics Today , May 2006.

  21. Gribbin and Gribbin, 81.

  22. Max Planck to Einstein, July 6, 1907.

  23. Max Planck and three others to the Prussian Academy, June 12, 1913, CPAE 5: 445.

  24. Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 44; Max Born, “Einstein’s Statistical Theories,” in Schilpp, 163.

  25. Quoted in Gerald Holton, “Millikan’s Struggle with Theory,”Europhysics News 31 (2000): 3.

  26. Einstein to Michele Besso, Dec. 12, 1951, AEA 7-401.

  27. Completed Apr. 30, 1905, submitted to the University of Zurich on July 20, 1905, submitted to Annalen der Physik in revised form on Aug. 19, 1905, and published by Annalen der Physik Jan. 1906. See Norton 2006c and www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/Einstein_stat_1905/.

  28. Jos Uffink, “Insuperable Difficulties: Einstein’s Statistical Road to Molecular Physics,”Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 37 (2006): 37, 60.

  29. bulldog.u-net.com/avogadro/avoga.html.

  30. Rigden, 48–52; Bernstein 1996a, 88; Gribbin and Gribbin, 49–54; Pais 1982, 88.

  31. Hoffmann 1972, 55; Seelig 1956b, 72; Pais 1982, 88–89.

  32. Brownian motion introduction, CPAE 2 (German), p. 206; Rigden, 63.

  33. Einstein, “On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in Liquids at Rest Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat,” submitted to the Annalen der Physik on May 11, 1905.

  34. Einstein 1949b, 47.

  35. The root mean square average is asymptotic to ff2n/?. Good analyses of the relationship of random walks to Einstein’s Brownian motion are in Gribbin and Gribbin, 61; Bernstein 2006, 117. I am grateful to George Stranahan of the Aspen Center for Physics for his help on the mathematics behind this relationship.

  36. Einstein, “On the Theory of Brownian Motion,” 1906, CPAE 2: 32 (in which he notes Seidentopf ’s results); Gribbin and Gribbin, 63; Clark, 89; Max Born, “Einstein’s Statistical Theories,” in Schilpp, 166.

  CHAPTER SIX: SPECIAL RELATIVITY

  1. Contemporary historical research on Einstein’s special theory begins with Gerald Holton’s essay, “On the Origins of the Special Theory of Relativity” (1960), reprinted in
Holton 1973, 165. Holton remains a guiding light in this field. Most of his earlier essays are incorporated in his books Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein (1973), Einstein, History and Other Passions (2000), and The Scientific Imagination, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.