Abstract
IMAGINE THAT YOU are on the editorial board of a prestigious physics journal and that you receive a paper that is unorthodox in style and format. Its title has little to do with most of its content; it has no citations to current literature; a significant portion of its first half seems to be philosophical banter on the nature of certain basic physical concepts taken for granted by everyone; the only experiment explicitly discussed could be explained adequately using current physical theory and is not considered to be of fundamental importance. Yet, with a minimum of mathematics, the little-known author deduces exactly a result that has heretofore required several drastic approximations. Furthermore, you are struck by certain of the author’s general principles, and you feel that they promise additional simplifications. So you decide to publish the paper. This could well have been the frame of mind of the most eminent theoretical physicist on the Curatorium of the Annalen der Physik, Max Planck, when he received from the editor’s office Albert Einstein’s 1905 paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”—the relativity paper.1
There is no inductive method which could lead to the fundamental concepts of physics. Failure to understand this fact constituted the basic philosophical error of so many investigators of the nineteenth century.
A. Einstein (1936)
I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.
Letter of A. Einstein to M. Besso of 8 October 1952 (Einstein, 1972)
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Notes
(A version of this chapter was presented as a lecture at the Einstein Centennial Symposium, The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem, 14–23 March 1979, and published in G. Hol-ton and Y. Elkana (eds.), Albert Einstein and His Time: Jerusalem Centenary Symposium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). I acknowledge the permission of Princeton University Press to reprint portions of this material.)
As far as we know, the editorial policy of the Annalen was that an author’s initial contributions were scrutinized by either the editor (in 1905, Paul Drude) or a member of the Curatorium; subsequent papers were published with little or no refereeing. Einstein had appeared in print in the Annalen five times by 1905, so his relativity paper was probably accepted on receipt. I thank Dr. Allan Needell for this information, at which he arrived as a result of studying the correspondence between Planck and Wilhelm Wien.
For details see my (1981b) and Holton (1973).
Instead of using Lorentz’s original units, I take the liberty to write Eqs. (1)–(5) in absolute Gaussian (cgs) units, whose usefulness was emphasized first by Max Abraham in 1902 and 1903. Abraham was also the first to use the nomenclature “Maxwell-Lorentz equations,” which appears in Einstein’s relativity paper of 1905.
These three letters from Poincaré to Lorentz are analyzed in my (1980, 1981b).
For a discussion of Faraday’s experiments with rotating magnets and of the treatment of unipolar induction in electrical engineering and physics up to the present, see my (1981a). My (1981b), especially Chapter 3, focuses on the influence of unipolar induction on Einstein’s thinking toward the special theory of relativity.
For discussions of Planck’s work see Klein (1962), Jammer (1966), and Kuhn (1978).
In addition, Einstein wrote a Ph.D. dissertation (1905a) and published a fourth paper in which he developed the equivalence of mass and energy (1905e).
According to Kaufmann (1906), in 1905 Einstein had avoided the severe approximations on the motion of electrons that was required for deriving Newton’s second law from Lorentz’s force equation, that is, the quasistationary approximation. Rather, continued Kaufmann, Einstein replaced Lorentz’s assumptions on how electrons interact with the ether with purely phenome-nological assumptions concerning how clocks are synchronized using light signals.
Zahn and Spees (1938) demonstrated that the resolution of Bucherer’s velocity filters was inadequate to distinguish between the various competing electron theories. In fact, this shortcoming pervaded every other experimental determination of the electron’s mass in the period 1908–1915. For details see Miller (1981b).
Thus was Pierre Duhem’s connection of the style of thinking of French scientists and German scientists not completely correct. Recall that in his classic Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, Duhem described the British scientist as seeking mechanical models in order to understand phenomena, while French and German scientists seek abstract mathematical representations. Duhem chose Hertz as the typical German scientist. But Hertz happened to be one of those German scientists who advocated discarding mental pictures once a theory’s axiomatic foundation is set. For example, for Hertz Maxwell’s theory was “Maxwell’s system of equations” (1893). Thus, Hertz did not consider magnetic lines of force to be a fundamental Anschauung (Miller, 1981a). See also the discussion of Hertz’s mechanics in Chapter 2.
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Miller, A.I. (1984). The Special Theory of Relativity: Einstein’s Response to the Physics and Philosophy of 1905. In: Imagery in Scientific Thought Creating 20th-Century Physics. Birkhäuser, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-0545-3_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-0545-3_4
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