Secrets of the Old One: Einstein, 1905 [Hardcover]

Makes these ideas accessible to a general reader complex concepts of relativity and the stimulated emission of light through the use of mathematics no more difficult than one learns in high school.

Written by a noted and successful science writer. 

Noted science writer Jeremy Bernstein tells the remarkable story of Einsteins papers and their impact one century ago.

Explains the many technological ramifications of ideas which changed our lives in the twentieth century and continue to do so.

Beginning on the 18th of March, 1905,at approximately eight week intervals, the noted German physics journal Annalen der Physik received three hand-written manuscripts from a relatively unknown patent examiner in Bern. The patent examiner was the twenty-six year old Albert Einstein and the three papers would set the agenda for twentieth century physics. A fourth short paper was received by the journal on the 27th of September. It contained Einstein's derivation of the formula E=mc². These papers with their many technological ramifications changed our lives in the twentieth century and beyond. While to a professional physicist the mathematics in these papers is quite straight forward, the ideas behind the mathematics are not. In fact, none of Einstein's contemporaries fully understood what he had done. The goal of this book is to make these ideas accessible to a general reader with no more mathematics than one learns in high school.

PRAISE FOR BOOK:

With wonderfully chosen digressions and some sophisticated physics plus the minimum amount of math to support it, Jeremy Bernstein has produced a charming account of Einsteins epoch-making papers of 1905. Here is surely the thinking persons guide to Einsteins Miracle Year.

Owen Gingerich, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,   &lãe