Einstein on Einstein : : Autobiographical and Scientific Reflections / / Hanoch Gutfreund, Jürgen Renn.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2020 English
• VerfasserIn: Renn, Jürgen,; Gutfreund, Hanoch,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2020]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (216 p.) :; 33 b/w illus.

New perspectives on the iconic physicist's scientific and philosophical formationAt the end of World War II, Albert Einstein was invited to write his intellectual autobiography for the Library of Living Philosophers. The resulting book was his uniquely personal Autobiographical Notes, a classic work in the history of science that explains the development of his ideas with unmatched warmth and clarity. Jürgen Renn and Hanoch Gutfreund introduce Einstein's scientific reflections to today's readers, tracing his intellectual formation from childhood to old age and offering a compelling portrait of the making of a philosopher-scientist.Einstein on Einstein features the full English text of Autobiographical Notes along with incisive essays that place Einstein's reflections in the context of the different stages of his scientific life. Renn and Gutfreund draw on Einstein's writings, personal correspondence, and critical writings by Einstein's contemporaries to provide new perspectives on his greatest discoveries. Also included are Einstein's responses to his critics, which shed additional light on his scientific and philosophical worldview. Renn and Gutfreund "e extensively from Einstein's initial, unpublished attempts to formulate his response, and also look at another brief autobiographical text by Einstein, written a few weeks before his death, which is published here for the first time in English.Complete with evocative drawings by artist Laurent Taudin, Einstein on Einstein illuminates the iconic physicist's journey to general relativity while situating his revolutionary ideas alongside other astonishing scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Introduction -- I. Preliminaries -- 1. The Genesis and Scope of the Autobiographical Notes -- 2. Schilpp's Enterprise: The Library of Living Philosophers -- 3. Historical Background: The Year 1946 -- 4. Einstein's Autobiographical Notes and Planck's Scientific Autobiography -- II. The Autobiographical Notes-Commentaries -- 1. The Quest for a Unified Worldview -- 2. "Striving for a Conceptual Grasp of Things" -- 3. "My Epistemological Credo" -- 4. The Mechanical Worldview and Its Demise: "And Now to the Critique of Mechanics as the Basis of Physics" -- 5. The Rise of the Electromagnetic Worldview and the Field Concept: "The Transition from Action at a Distance to Fields" -- 6. Planck's Black-Body Radiation Formula: "But the Matter Has a Serious Drawback" -- 7. Einstein's Statistical Mechanics: Closing the "Gap" -- 8. Brownian Motion: "The Existence of Atoms of Definite Finite Size" -- 9. A Reflecting Mirror in Radiation Field: "The Mirror Must Experience Certain Random Fluctuations" -- 10. The Special Theory of Relativity: "There Is No Such Thing as Simultaneity of Distant Events" -- 11. The General Theory of Relativity: "Why Were Another Seven Years Required?" -- 12. Quantum Mechanics: "This Theory Offers No Useful Point of Departure for Future Development" -- 13. The Unified Field Theory: "Finding the Field Equations for the Total Field" -- III. Einstein and His Critics -- 1. The Physicists and Philosophers Who Contributed to the Volume -- 2. Einstein's "Reply to Criticisms" -- IV. Einstein's "Autobiographical Sketch" (1955) -- 1. Introductory Remarks -- 2. "Autobiographical Sketch"-An English Translation -- V. Concluding Remarks: Einstein the Philosopher-Scientist -- VI. Reprint of the English Translation of Autobiographical Notes -- References -- Index