Wednesday, June 29, 2005

A Personal Account By Einstein On Constructing Relativity

HOW I CONSTRUCTED THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY, an article I happen to surf over the internet, which can be downloaded at the AAPPS website ( Einstein tells of his personal account on his construction of the RELATIVITY theory, one of 20th century's greatest achievements toward the most fundamental understanding of nature's sometimes bizarre behaviour. In the article, it took only five weeks for Einstein to complete the construction of the Special Theory of Relativity, while interestingly as accounted by him, it took him more than eight years to generalize his Special Relativity theory into General Relativity so as to include the phenomenon of Gravitation starting from 1907 as he was asked by Stark for a review article on the results of his Special Theory, as he began then thinking on the problem of gravity having to be guided himself by Ernst Mach's claim on the equivalence between inertial and gravitational masses.Further on, he became virtually a student of a new mathematics of his time, the geometry of Reimann and tensor calculus, as he continued on his quest to give gravity a framework of motions not just constant ones but also including those that are accelerated. You can read more on this if you like at the above website.

This year marks a century hence for the Theory of Special Relativity as this year was declared internationally as the world year of physics to commemorate the miraculous years when Einstein set himself on the major issues of his time. Prior to his fame, he was just an obscured humble clerk in a patent office, who was finding himself in much of his free time devising gedanken or thought experiment, which is a series of experiments and theoretical "IF's" that could only be constructed inside the mind with the help of a piece of chalk and blackboard. Einstein was excellent at this, solving problems in the manner of careful re-examination on the accepted laws,and see where they fail to account. He is a modern physics thinker though he could not accept the indeterministic views of the equally gigantic theory of quantum mechanics to which he has a significant contribution when he worked out the quantum explanation of photoelectric effect. The basics of his explanation have led further to theoretical developments regarding the nature of emission and absorption of light that these have led to the development of the LASERS.Much much much...

No comments: