Abstract
There are several cases of what I call epic journeys in the history of science. Not Ulysses-like journeys on land and sea, but journeys of the mind. Kepler’s wrestling with data of the planet Mars, from which he deduced its elliptical orbit, was a solitary achievement of momentous consequent. In October 1601, upon the death of the observational astronomer extraordinaire, the Dane, Tycho Brahe, Kepler inherited Tycho’s job and the most up-to-date and detailed observational data of Mars ever. Probably early in 1602 he began his quest to calculate the orbit of Mars from Tycho’s data. Kepler wagered that he would finish the task in a few weeks; it took him over 3 years, during the course of which he called his struggle his “war with Mars.” He finally deduced the elliptical path of the planet around Easter 1605 – a truly epic journey, the details of which are still being scrutinized by historians poring over Kepler’s notes and writings. The same is true for Einstein’s struggle with formulating a gravitational theory of relativity, which too was nearly solitary over his 8-year slog.
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Notes
- 1.
The intellectual journey from 1907 to 1915 was not necessarily a continuous process. There is a publishing a gap on the topic of gravity from late-1907 to mid-1911, with little discussion too in his correspondence. There are several reasons for this: he was publishing extensively in quantum physics over those years; he was very busy with teaching and administrative duties for the first time in his life; and he may have been “stuck” on how to turn the 1907 thought experiment into a theory of gravity. However, in the 1933 Glasgow lecture Einstein said that the problem of gravity “kept me busy from 1908 to 1911” (Einstein [47], p. 287), although this does not contradict the possibility that he was “stuck.” See Pais [162], pp. 187–190.
- 2.
- 3.
They were: Carl Friedrich Gauss and his pupil Bernhard Riemann in Germany, Janos Bólyai in Hungary, and Nikolai I. Lobachevski in Russia.
- 4.
Stachel [192], p. 281, attributes the source of the quotation to a fellow mathematics professor at the ETH, who had also been a friend of Einstein when they were students. Quoted too in Pais [162], p. 212, who also includes the German, “Grossmann, Du must mir helfen, sonst werd’ ich verrückt!”
- 5.
Letter of 29 October 1912 to Sommerfeld, in Einstein Papers, Vol. 5, Doc 421.
- 6.
Van Dongen [205], p. 120.
- 7.
“On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light,” Einstein Papers, Vol. 3, Doc. 23.
- 8.
Einstein Papers, Vol. 3, Doc. 23, p. 387 ET.
- 9.
(1876–1936).
- 10.
- 11.
Einstein Papers, Vol. 8, Doc. 39.
- 12.
Green [81], Introduction.
- 13.
Sitzungsberichte, Prussische Akademie der Wissenschaften; Reports of Proceedings of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, in Einstein Papers, Vol. 6, Docs., 21, 22, 24, and 25 (November 4, 11, 18, 25, respectively).
- 14.
- 15.
To be historically accurate, Le Verrier got 38 seconds, which was later corrected after he died. Also, the actual advance of the planet was available in planetary data probably since the seventeenth century. Le Verrier’s calculation involved subtracting the gravitation effects of all the planets to account for this motion, and he was left with the unaccounted, hence anomalous, 38 arc-seconds per century.
- 16.
Letter of January 17, 1916. Quotation ending “…von freudiger Erregung.” Einstein Papers, Vol. 8, Doc. 182.
- 17.
The references are in Pais [162], p. 253.
- 18.
Einstein Papers, Vol. 5, Doc. 69.
- 19.
I few years ago a controversy arose among historians of science based on the discovery of an exchange of letters between Einstein and the German mathematician, David Hilbert, who began working on the problem after he heard Einstein present it in a lecture. Did Hilbert beat Einstein to the correct answer first? Most historians now say, No – but some are still not convinced. A good summary of the debate, with extensive citations, is in Isaacson [109], pp. 212–222.
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Topper, D.R. (2013). Einstein’s Epic Intellectual Journey: 1907 to 1915. In: How Einstein Created Relativity out of Physics and Astronomy. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 394. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4782-5_14
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