![]() Will has already accepted invitations to more than 25 WYP conferences and outreach activities worldwide, including participating in a 15-event public lecture tour of Canada and presenting lectures in Germany, Italy, France, Spain and Japan. In a review of the new book, Publishers Weekly says: "Rigden writes with a rare felicity, free of jargon and with everyday metaphors that Einstein himself would no doubt have appreciated." Rigden is also author of "Hydrogen: The Essential Element," which Discover magazine named as one of the 20 best science books of 2002. "Einstein 1905" explains what Einstein said in each of his famous papers, including the one on his special theory of relavity, the context in which they were presented and the impact they had - and still have - on society. Rigden wrote "Einstein 1905, The Standard of Greatness," which is being released in January by Harvard University Press. A second edition was published in 1993, and at last count, it has been translated in 10 languages. His 1986 book "Was Einstein Right?" made The New York Times Christmas Books list that year and won the highly coveted American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award, which is given annually to the best popular science book. Will is known worldwide as one of the leading experts in experimental tests of Einstein's theory of general relativity. ![]() Rigden, Ph.D., adjunct professor of physics. Will, Ph.D., professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, and John S. Louis who are both known for their ability to speak and write clearly about physics to the layperson will be giving talks throughout 2005 about Einstein's ideas and their impact on science and society 100 years later. Two physicists from Washington University in St. The arXiv e-print service, maintained by Cornell University Library, is a repository where physicists, mathematicians, astronomers and some biologists post reports of their research as soon as they are available, in advance of publication in professional journals.Image: The year 2005 marks the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's "miracle year" when he published a series of scientific papers that revolutionized our view of space, time and the atom. "Scientists in Germany must surely have known about this paper, and some may have produced translations for English-speaking colleagues," he speculated, adding that he has asked several Europeans to search further. Īshcroft cautions that this may not be a true first. Schmekel then obtained permission from Leiden to copyright the English translation and submitted it to the history of science section of the arXiv, where it can be found at. No English translation seemed to exist, so Ashcroft arranged for Schmekel to translate it. Reading through these books, Ashcroft found hints that the Einstein paper existed, and he asked Patricia Viele, physics and astronomy librarian at Cornell's Edna McConnell Clark Physical Sciences Library, to try to locate it. They are still on display in a small oak cabinet in Clark Hall. The professor was about to throw away his personal collection of the old Leiden Communications (a journal devoted mainly to low-temperature physics), but Ashcroft arranged to have the books shipped to Cornell. Some years ago Ashcroft happened to be visiting Leiden when a retiring professor was cleaning out his office. The paper was discovered through a series of serendipitous events. "It's just wonderful to know that the greatest scientist had an interest in this dramatic phenomenon," added Ashcroft, whose own research partly deals with superconductivity in metallic hydrogen. ![]() Among other things, Ashcroft said, Einstein correctly predicted that a strong magnetic field would destroy superconductivity, something verified later by experiment. The paper contains nothing revolutionary from the point of view of today's researchers in superconductivity, but it is, Ashcroft said, "a totally charming paper," with significant insights for its time. And there, apparently, it remained largely unnoticed until this year, when it was rediscovered by Neil Ashcroft, the Horace White Professor of Physics at Cornell, and translated from German into English by Björn Schmekel, then a Cornell graduate student and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California-Berkeley. The paper, "Theoretical Remark on the Superconductivity of Metals," was written in 1922 for a symposium honoring Dutch scientist Kamerlingh Onnes, the discoverer of superconductivity, and published by the University of Leiden in the proceedings of the symposium. Cornell University's arXiv e-print service on the Web is a place to find reports on the latest research almost as soon as it happens.īut as television networks are fond of saying, if you haven't seen it before, it is new, so it is appropriate that the arXiv now includes a previously obscure paper by a then up-and-coming young physicist named Albert Einstein.
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