Author:
Gutfreund, Hanoch, 1935- author.
ImprintPrinceton : Princeton University Press, [2020]
Descriptionxi, 197 pages : illustrations ; 27 cm
Note:Includes some primary source material.
Note:Introduction -- I. Preliminaries -- The Genesis and Scope of the Autobiographical Notes -- Schilpp's Enterprise: The Library of Living Philosophers -- Historical Background: The Year 1946 -- Einstein's Autobiographical Notes and Planck's Scientific Autobiography -- II. The Autobiographical notes: commentarires -- The Quest for a Unified Worldview -- "Striving for a Conceptual Grasp of Things" -- "My Epistemological Credo" -- The Mechanical Worldview and Its Demise: "And Now to the Critique of Mechanics as the Basis of Physics" -- The Rise of the Electromagnetic Worldview and the Field Concept: "The Transition from Action at a Distance to Fields" -- Planck's Black-Body Radiation Formula: "But the Matter Has a Serious Drawback" -- Einstein's Statistical Mechanics: Closing the "Gap" -- Brownian Motion: "The Existence of Atoms of Definite Finite Size" -- A Reflecting Mirror in Radiation Field: "The Mirror Must Experience Certain Random Fluctuations" -- The Special Theory of Relativity: "There Is No Such Thing as Simultaneity of Distant Events" -- The General Theory of Relativity: "Why Were Another Seven Years Required?" -- Quantum Mechanics: "This Theory Offers No Useful Point of Departure for Future Development" -- The Unified Field Theory: "Finding the Field Equations for the Total Field" -- III. Einstein and his critics -- The Physicists and Philosophers Who Contributed to the Volume -- Einstein's "Reply to Criticisms" -- IV. Einstein's "Autobiographical sketch" (1955) -- Introductory Remarks -- "Autobiographical Sketch": An English Translation -- V. Concluding Remarks: Einstein the Philosopher-Scientist -- VI. Reprint of the English Translation of Autobiographical Notes.
Bibliography Note:Includes bibliographical references (pages 185-189) and index.
Note:"Einstein begins his Autobiographical Notes with one problem he never quite solved: "What, precisely, is thinking?" To answer, he turns inward to the very shape of his thoughts, the ongoing struggle to connect local observation, or what he calls the "momentary and personal," to the larger "mental grasp of things." Einstein situates his greatest discoveries amongst the other twentieth-century breakthroughs in the field and closely examines how these discoveries punctuated and propelled his own intellectual development. The autobiography expands what we know about Einstein's childhood education, readings in philosophy, and journey to the theory of general relativity. In this book, Autobiographical Notes is accompanied by introductions, essays, and commentary by Hanoch Gutfreud and Jürgen Renn, who draw on biographical information, written correspondence, and their knowledge of Einstein scholarship to render these difficult texts accessible to readers. They have also collected critical writings by Einstein's contemporaries alongside Einstein's own responses to these interlocutors, as well as Einstein's Autobiographical Sketch, composed just before his death in 1955, which is published for the first time in English."-- Provided by publisher.
