The most famous nerd tale of all is the tale of Einstein's annus mirabilis, the single year (of 1905) in which he published three ground-breaking papers (Relativity, Photoelectric Effect, and Brownian Motion) which rocked the scientific world and rocketed him to fame. This all-the-while working at the patent office and boinking his cousin Elsa. (Corrigendum: cousin boinking came later). Einstein praised the simple life as superb for theoretical work, going so far as to suggest would-be Einsteins take jobs at lighthouses as a means of granting them unencumbered quiet time to focus on their ideas. Well, maybe. With Tea Party efforts to kill research funding in America roundly successful, there are probably more Ph.D.s working McJobs than at any time in history and we have yet to see a spate of revolutionary scientific articles overturning established dogma. Maybe the only thing holding us back from perpetual motion machines and proof of aliens is peer review. Maybe we just need more lighthouses.
Whatevs. Here's the opening of Albert's seminal paper on Relativity translated into the Queen's English.
Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper.
A. Einstein Ann. der Physik. 17: 891 (1905)
A. Einstein Ann. der Physik. 17: 891 (1905)
It is known that Maxwell's electrodynamics -- as usually understood at the present time -- when applied to moving bodies, leads to asymmetries which do not appear to be inherent in the phenomena.
No comments:
Post a Comment