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Einstein's Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics by Albert Einstein (Hardcover, 1998)

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This book brings those papers together in an accessible format. The best-known papers are the two that founded special relativity: On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies and Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?.

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After 1905, Einstein's miraculous year, physics would never be the same again. In those 12 months, Einstein shattered many cherished scientific beliefs in five papers that would establish him as the world's leading physicist. This book brings those papers together in an accesible format. The introduction explains their development and their historical significance. The best-known papers are the two that founded special relativity: On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies and Does the Intertia of a Body Depend on its Energy Content? . In the former, Einstein showed that absolute time has to be replaced by a new absolute: the speed of light. In the second, he asserted the equivalence of mass and energy, which would lead to the formula E=mc2. The book also includes On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light , in which Einstein challenged the theory of light, suggesting that light would also be regarded as a collection of particles. This helped to open the door to a whole new world - that of quantum physics. For ideas in this paper, he won the Nobel Prize in 1921. The fourth paper also led to a Nobel Prize, although for another scientist, Jean Perrin. On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquid Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat concerns the Brownian motion of such particles. With profound insight, Einstein blends ideas from kinetic theory and classical hydrodynamics to derive an equation for the mean free path of such particles as a function of the time, which Perrin confirmed experimentally. The fifth paper, A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions , was Einstein's doctoral dissertation, and remains among his most cited articles. It shows how to calculate Avagadro's number and the size of molecules.