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The cover of Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein

Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein

Pais, Abraham

How did Einstein's mind work, and how did his ideas about relativity and light change physics?

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At a glance

Author
Pais, Abraham

Why read it

  • You will see how fast physics can change: one decade around nineteen hundred overturned what the experts had expected
  • You will learn to follow a scientific idea from first hunch to finished theory, step by step
  • You will come to know Einstein through what he thought and how he thought, which he said was the essence of a man like him

Who it is for

  • Curious readers who want the ideas, not only the legend
  • Science students wanting to see how theories are built
  • Anyone who admires Einstein but never learned what he did

Contents

  1. ‘Subtle is the Lord … ’
  2. Foreword
  3. To the Reader
  4. Plates
  5. I
  6. INTRODUCTORY
  7. Purpose and Plan
  8. Relativity Theory and Quantum Theory
  9. Portrait of the Physicist as a Young Man
  10. II
  11. STATISTICAL PHYSICS
  12. Entropy and Probability
  13. The Reality of Molecules
  14. III
  15. RELATIVITY, THE SPECIAL THEORY
  16. ‘Subtle is the Lord…’
  17. The New Kinematics
  18. The Edge of History
  19. IV
  20. RELATIVITY, THE GENERAL THEORY
  21. ‘The Happiest Thought of my Life’
  22. Herr Professor Einstein
  23. The Prague Papers
  24. The Einstein-Grossmann Collaboration
  25. Field Theories of Gravitation: the First Fifty Years
  26. The Field Equations of Gravitation
  27. The New Dynamics
  28. V
  29. THE LATER JOURNEY
  30. ‘The Suddenly Famous Doctor Einstein’
  31. Unified Field Theory
  32. VI
  33. THE QUANTUM THEORY
  34. Preliminaries
  35. The Light-Quantum
  36. Einstein and Specific Heats
  37. The Photon
  38. Interlude: The BKS Proposal
  39. A Loss of Identity: the Birth of Quantum Statistics
  40. Einstein as a Transitional Figure: The Birth of Wave Mechanics
  41. Einstein’s Response to the New Dynamics
  42. Einstein’s Vision
  43. VII
  44. JOURNEY’S END
  45. The Final Decade
  46. Epilogue
  47. VIII
  48. APPENDICES
  49. Of Tensors and a Hearing Aid and Many Other Things: Einstein’s Collaborators
  50. How Einstein got the Nobel Prize
  51. Einstein’s Proposals for the Nobel Prize
  52. An Einstein Chronology

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