Special Relativity

[kangaroo_in_black]

Ok, this is from Was Einstein a plagarist.

In fact, as Einstein’s critics long ago demonstrated, virtually all the better-known elements of the theory–most famously, the equivalence of matter and energy (E = mc²)–had previously been suggested by others.

If I remember correctly, E = mc² was not an element of the theory of special relativity. After some searching via google, it appears that this equation was derived based on some results of special relativity.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equivME/ .

Although I’m trying to verfy these claims by getting the papers, that takes some time. Does anyone have A copy of “The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 2: The Swiss Years: Writings, 1900-1909”, which I believe contains the papers in question?

[Mathochist]

@kangaroo_in_black

If I remember correctly, E = mc² was not an element of the theory of special relativity. After some searching via google, it appears that this equation was derived based on some results of special relativity.

So it’s not an axiom of the theory, but a consequence. It’s still part of the theory.

[goodtymecharlie]

“If the universe is infinite then the earth is not neceessarily, or even possibly, at its center. And, if that is so, the earth may well be circling the sun. It is only the viewpoint of the observer as he stands on the earth that makes him think it the center of the universe. The same would be true of anybody standing on the moon or on any one of the stars and planets there might be in the universe. And if everything were relative to everything else, the only way to know where you were, on earth or on a planet, would be to find a way to measure the ‘elsewhere’.”

Nicholas of Kues, Reconciliation of Opposites, ca. 1440

[bonzer]

@kangaroo_in_black

Does anyone have A copy of “The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 2: The Swiss Years: Writings, 1900-1909”, which I believe contains the papers in question?

I suspect that you might be better off looking for John Stachel’s Einstein’s Miraculous Year (Princeton, 1998). Stachel is one of the editors on the Collected Papers and this little book contains its English translations of all the 1905 papers, together with (and this isn’t in the English version of Volume 2) his introductions explaining what they’re about.
The point I’m guessing you’re half-remembering is that E = mc[sup]2[/sup] isn’t mentioned in Einstein’s first paper on special relativity. It was only a couple of months after writing this paper that he realised that the relation is a consequence (as Mathochist has said) of what he’d proposed in it. He then wrote up a short paper deriving the result and published that as a follow-up in the same journal (Ann. d. Phys. 17 (1905), 891).
[To be pedantic, he proves that m = E/c[sup]2[/sup] in the second paper, or rather, in the notation that he was using, L/v[sup]2[/sup]. The more familiar version doesn’t appear in print for, IIRC, another year or so.]

[John_W.Kennedy]

In response to “Relativity early”, note that Einstein never claimed to have invented relativity. He merely came up with a new explanation for how relativity works after the traditional equations (traditionally associated with the name of Galileo) had broken down.