Volume 3
The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein This volume presents Einstein's writings for the
two-year period starting in
October 1909. The initial date marks his departure from the Swiss
Patent Office
at Bern, which had been his professional home for seven years, and the
beginning of his first academic appointment, at the University of
Zurich. The
volume concludes with the masterful report that Einstein, by then a
full
professor at the German University in Prague, gave to the Solvay
Congress, the
first international meeting devoted to the problems of radiation and
the
quantum theory. Most of Einstein's efforts during these years went into
his
struggle with these ever more perplexing problems of quanta, on which
he made
discouragingly little progress. Einstein's new academic career
naturally
required him to teach, and almost half of this volume consists of the
previously unpublished notes he wrote in preparation for his lectures
on mechanics,
on electricity and magnetism, and on kinetic theory and statistical
mechanics.
The last of these are particularly interesting in reflecting some of
his
research interests. Several papers here are concerned with aspects of
the
special theory of relativity, but it is Einstein's article of June 1911
that is
a harbinger of things to come: it contains his calculation of the
bending of
light in a gravitational field on the basis of his equivalence
principle. |
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