In 1905, Albert Einstein—then an unprepossessing patent examiner in Bern, Switzerland—published in quick succession four papers that would shake the foundations of contemporary physics and force a reconstruction, still unsettled to this day, of its basic notions of space, time, mass, energy, light, and matter. One of these, on Brownian motion, proved the reality of atoms—not a universally accepted notion at the time; another elaborated a theory of the photoelectric effect—early grist for the coming quantum revolution; and, perhaps most famously, it was here that Einstein introduced his special theory of relativity, preceding the general theory by a decade. What was so new, and so remarkable, about the ideas introduced in these four papers? What conceptual ground did they break—and to what practical effect?
In this course, we will examine these four papers and their legacies, 120 years on. With John Stachel’s collection Einstein’s Miraculous Year as a reference and guide to the science, we will work carefully through Einstein’s technical papers, asking as we go: How did Einstein’s approach to physical problems differ from the orthodoxy of his time? Who and what else contributed to his radical rethinking of the physical world? How did the physics establishment react to and adapt to Einstein’s work? And what have been the lasting impacts of these papers, on everything from how we understand physics to how we apply it? On the way science is done to the way the social world understands the physical one?
