If matter escapes us, as that of air and light because of its extreme tenuity, if bodies are placed far from us in the immensity of space, if man wishes to know the aspect of the heavens at successive periods separated by many centuries, if gravity and heat act in the interior of the solid earth at depths which will forever be inaccessible, mathematical analysis is still able to trace the laws of these phenomena. It compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies which unite them. Its chief attribute is clearness it has no means for expressing confused ideas. To a surprisingly large extent, that is precisely what he had done. It looks as though he had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided, without listening to the opinions of others. The conclusions, the bizarre conclusions, emerge as though with the greatest of ease: the reasoning is unbreakable. There is a good deal of verbal commentary. All of them are written in a style unlike any other theoretical physicist’s.
This last paper contains no references and quotes no authority. The third paper was the special theory of relativity, which quietly amalgamated space, time, and matter into one fundamental unity. This was like a conjuring trick, easy when explained: before it, decent scientists could still doubt the concrete existence of atoms and molecules: this paper was as near to a direct proof of their concreteness as a theoretician could give. Another dealt with the phenomenon of Brownian motion, the apparently erratic movement of tiny particles suspended in a liquid: Einstein showed that these movements satisfied a clear statistical law. One, very simple, gave the quantum explanation of the photoelectric effect-it was this work for which, sixteen years later, he was awarded the Nobel prize. Three of them were among the greatest in the history of physics. Einstein, twenty-six years old, only three years away from crude privation, still a patent examiner, published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905 five papers on entirely different subjects.
0 kommentar(er)
