THE SPECIAL RELATIVITY THEORY: EINSTEIN'S RESPONSE TO THE PHYSICS OF 1905

摘要

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.