Albert Einstein claims that one of his most profound thoughts was “What would a light beam look like if you could run alongside it?”. And taking this idea to its extreme he extended the transformations of the Italian “Giant”. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) deriving independently the Lorentz-Fitzgerald transformations and onto Special Relativity.
The Nobel Prize and Beyond
During Albert’s Annus Mirabalis of 1905 he wrote four papers that completely changed the landscape of Physics forever. For his quantum explanation of the Photoelectric effect, he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. He also enunciated his famous mass-energy relation which by the way is not the complete expression (it is the first term in a binomial expansion that Newton (1643-1727) invented). He also explained Brownian motion as a thermodynamic property.
Einstein’s Triumphs in Relativity
In fact, my late PhD supervisor had in his library the book that Albert himself wrote on the subject which was kindly given to me by his late wife. In the same year Albert Einstein put forward his Special theory of Relativity just beating the great French Mathematical “Giant” Henri Poincare (1854-1912) to its summit. Staying with unwanted races, scholars claim that Albert was almost caught in his deliberations in arriving at his General Theory of Relativity by the Mathematician David Hilbert (1862-1943).
In passing I would like to add that Albert was asked to resubmit his PhD thesis after submission as his examiners claimed that it did not have sufficient references. The first rendition having only two (the text by Maxwell, “Treatise of Electricity and Magnetism” and Boltzmann’s exposition of Statistical Mechanics), after including additional sources he was awarded his PhD.
Special and General Theories
Returning to Maxwell and Boltzmann these two were “Giants” in their own right but who both sadly died in their prime, Maxwell (1831-1879) was a Senior Wrangler runner up at Trinity College. Other Senior Wranglers include some well-known names including George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1903) one half of the famous equation of motion of a real fluid (Navier-Stokes equation), Arthur Cayley (1821-1895) who is linked to the development of matrices and the theory of invariants and Arthur Eddington (1882-144) who was Einstein’s champion and who first demonstrated that Albert’s General Theory of Relativity was more accurate in explaining certain gravitational phenomena than Newton’s inverse square law.
Legacy of Giants
Albert’s field equations given here have been summed up beautifully by the legendary John Wheeler (1911-2008) thus
“Space-time tells matter how to move; matter tells space-time how to curve”.
I wish I could go on to discuss how Albert had difficulties working with tensors (as we all do). It was his boyhood friend Marcell Grossman assist him with their comprehension. but as always my meanderings have taken me far and wide and I have run out of space.
Until next time.
