Einstein: the formative years, 1879--1909 (Q1841304)

This volume collects some of the best recent scholarship on what might be termed Einstein's formative period, that is, the thirty years before he obtained his first academic position in 1909. Topics covered include Einstein's early reading and his university education, his early views on scientific method and some of the crucial philosophical influences shaping those views, his early work on statistical mechanics, Brownian motion, quantum theory, relativity theory, and his youthful vision of a unified foundation for physics. An engaging book examining the young Einstein from a variety of perspectives -- personal, scientific, historical, and philosophical. This is a fine collection of articles most of which have not been published before edited by two well-known experts. Contents: John Stachel, Introduction to Einstein: the formative years (1--22); Frederick Gregory, The mysteries and wonders of natural science: Aaron Bernstein's Naturwissenschaftliche Volksbücher and the adolescent Einstein (23--41); David Cahan, The young Einstein's physics education: H. F. Weber, Hermann von Helmholtz, and the Zürich Polytechnic Physics Institute (43--82); Mara Beller, Kant's impact on Einstein's thought (83--106); Jürgen Renn, Einstein's controversy with Drude and the origin of statistical mechanics: a new glimpse from the ''love letters'' (107--157); Robert Rynasiewicz, The construction of the special theory: some queries and considerations (159--201); Sahotra Sarkar, Physical approximations and stochastic processes in Einstein's 1905 paper on Brownian motion (203--229); John Stachel, Einstein's light-quantum hypothesis, or Why didn't Einstein propose a quantum gas a decade-and-a-half earlier? (231--251).