Book Review: Einstein's Dreams

This is a review of Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman.

In my opinion, science progresses a little bit at a time. This video is an inspiration to me, and I also referred to The Mystery of the Einstein–Poincaré Connection, Albert Einstein | In the Dark, and Wikipedia on Relativity priority dispute and History of special relativity. The clue is: it’s called Lorentz transformation.

• 1881, J. J. Thomson. Charged particles are harder to move.
• 1893, J. J. Thomson. The limit of speed is the speed of light.
• 1893, George Frederick Charles Searle. Equation for EM mass: $$m_L = \frac{3}{4} m_{em} \frac{1}{\beta^2} [-\frac{1}{\beta}\ln{(\frac{1+\beta}{1-\beta})}+\frac{2}{1-\beta^2}] \tag{1}$$where $\beta = \frac{v}{c}$.
• 1899, Lorentz. Length contraction.
• 1901, Kaufman and Abraham. Transverse mass: $$m_T = \frac{3}{4} m_{em} \frac{1}{\beta^2} [(\frac{1+\beta^2}{2 \beta})\ln{(\frac{1+\beta}{1-\beta})}-1]\tag{2}$$longitudinal mass is the same as Eq. 1.
• 1902, Wein. Mass is electronic mass. There’s no gravitational mass.
• 1904, Lorentz. $$\begin{aligned} x^{\prime} &= \gamma(x-vt) \\ y^{\prime} &= y \\ z^{\prime} &= z \end{aligned}\tag{3}$$where $\gamma = \frac{1}{\sqrt{1-\beta^2}}$. So that we have length contraction and time dilation$$l^{\prime}=\frac{l}{\gamma}, t^{\prime}=\gamma t \tag{4}$$And longitudinal mass and transverse mass$$\begin{aligned} m_L &= \gamma^3 m_{em} \\ m_T &= \gamma m_{em} \end{aligned} \tag{5}$$
• 1905, Abraham. Electromagnetism does not make all the forces.
• 1905, Poincaré. $$\frac{E_\text{tot}}{c^2}=\frac{E_{\text{em}}+E_{\text{p}}}{c^2}=\frac{E_{\text{em}}+\frac{E_{\text{em}}}{3}}{c^2}=\frac{4}{3}\frac{E_{\text{em}}}{c^2}=\frac{4}{3}m_{\text{es}}=m_{\text{em}} \tag{6}$$which is basically $E_0=mc^2$. He also summarized eq. 4-5 as the Lorentz transformation and brought up proper time $$ t^{\prime} =\gamma(t-\frac{vx}{c^2})\tag{7}$$The issue is that Poincare found out with Lorentz transformation, the Ether is inconsequential.
• 1905, Einstein. He did not use the concept of aether, instead started with two principles:
  1. The speed of light is constant and is the limit of speed.
  2. The laws of physics are obeyed in every single reference frame. From these two principles he derived the Lorentz transformation.

From the memories of my childhood readings (in Chinese), when it comes to Special Relativity, the author would always romanticize it rather than show readers what really happened before Einstein published the paper about Special Relativity. And the joke about hot stove and girl is not funny. Don’t get me wrong, the dreams in the book are beautiful and I have nothing against it. Maybe it’s just not for me.