Does anyone besides me think that Einsteins observation that the brownian motion of pollen in water, considered the first real proof of the molecular theory of matter, is worth mentioning? --
BlackGriffen
What exactly did he observe? Wasn't the Brownian motion known already? --AxelBoldt
IIRC, it was Einstiens observation that the pollen in a glass of water underwent brownian motion that was consider the proof. I'll post more about it after I double check. --BlackGriffen
It is critically important. It was one of the most-often cited papers of Einstein's in the early part of his career. --RjLesch
A few quick refs:
http://www.matse.psu.edu/matsc81/GLOSSARYold/people14.html
http://www.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~suchii/einsteinBM.html
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_95/journal/vol4/ykl/report.html
Since we're adding Einstein's personal/political views, perhaps we should include this quote, "Marriage is nothing more than an attempt to make something lasting out of an incident." I don't know if those were his exact words, but it was very close to that. --BlackGriffen
THe first paragraph is bit dodgy. I think some Irish physicist was the first to propose Special Relativity before 1895. Possibly called Fitzgerald? Lorenz, Minkowski and others may also have been slightly before Einstein. As far as i know, Einstein was the first with a workable General Relativity, but that came later.
- While the particular Lorenz transformations were of course known, Einstein came up with an axiomatic approach to derive them and also with several re-interpretations of fundamental concepts, such as time and size, energy=mass etc.
I believe these parts of special relativity are exclusively his, and they are arguably more important than the transformation laws. --
AxelBoldt
- Agreed. The Lorenz-FitzGerald? contractions were really an attempt to rehabilitate the ether theory; Eistein's conceptual framework was fundamentally different, though it ended up using the same formulae. Lorenz and FitzGerald? are nonetheless important figures, as was Minkowski (though the Minkowski spacetime relations were, I believe, published in 1908 as a response to Einstein). --RjLesch.
"His theoretical work suggested the possibility of creating an atomic bomb." I think even this is too strong. Einstein's only contribution to the atomic bomb was political.