Special relativity turns 100

As Wired News notes in “A Century of Einstein”, special relativity and other discoveries from Albert Einstein‘s immortal 1905 papers celebrate their one hundredth anniversary this year.

I’ve been intrigued by relativity for as long as I can remember, but the thing that really hooked me on Einstein was seeing one of the first printings of his original special relativity paper in German in the University of Oklahoma’s History of Science Collections in the early 1990s. (It was situated near a 17th century printing of Principia Mathematica, not the sort of thing a geeky engineering type such as myself soon forgets!) The power of Einstein’s work from 1905 to effect us in our daily lives one hundred years later still amazes and inspires me.

If you aren’t already a fan, buy a copy of Einstein’s “Relativity : The Special and the General Theory” or click here to access the free Project Gutenberg text. If you’re interested at all in how things work, you’ll probably enjoy it.

Thanks for everything, Professor!