132 RELATIVITY, THE SPECIAL THEORY
The skepticism of his teachers was too great, the spirit of enterprise too small.
Albert had thus to turn aside from his plan, but not to give it up forever. He still
expected to approach the major questions of physics by observation and experi-
ment' [R2].
As to electromagnetic theory, Einstein was not offered a course on this subject
in his ETH days. As noted in Chapter 3, he learned this theory from Foppl's
textbook.
- The Winterthur Letter. A letter by Einstein to Grossmann, written in
1901 from Winterthur, informs us that aether drift experiments were still on Ein-
stein's mind: 'A new and considerably simpler method for investigating the motion
of matter relative to the light-aether has occurred to me. If the merciless fates
would just once give me the necessary quiet for its execution!' [E13]. Since there
are no preliminaries to this statement, one gains the impression that Grossmann
knew something about a previous method which Einstein must have had in mind
when they were together at the ETH.
This letter also shows that Einstein still believed in an aether as late as 1901.
- The Bern Lecture. On the evening of December 5, 1903, Albert Einstein,
technical expert third class with provisional appointment, held a lecture in the
conference room of the Hotel Storchen in Bern before the Naturforschende
Gesellschaft Bern. He had been elected to membership of this society on May 2,
- The subject of his December lecture was 'Theorie der elektromagnetischen
Wellen' [F6]. It would obviously be extraordinarily interesting to know what Ein-
stein said that evening. However, to the best of my knowledge, no record of his
talk exists.
- The Kyoto Address. Finally I quote another part of the translation from
German to Japanese to English of the Kyoto address that Einstein gave in 1922.
Before doing so, I should point out that I do not know what times are referred to
in the statements 'I then thought .. .' and 'In those days .. .'.
'I then thought I would want to prove experimentally to myself in any way the
flow of the aether to the earth, that is to say, the motion of the earth. In those days
when this problem arose in my mind, I had no doubt as to the existence of the
aether and the motion of the earth in it. Meanwhile I had a plan to try to test it
by means of measuring the difference of heats which were to appear in a ther-
mocouple according as the direction along or against which the light from a single
source was made to reflect by suitable mirrors, as I presupposed there should be
a difference between the energies of reflected lights in the opposite directions. This
idea was similar to the one in the Michelson experiment, but I had not carried out
the experiment yet to obtain any definite result' [Ol].
- Summary. In the same lecture Einstein remarked, 'It is never easy to talk
about how I got to the theory of relativity because there would be various con-
cealed complexities to motivate human thinking and because they worked with
different weights' [Ol]. Even with this admonition in mind, it would seem that
the following is a fair summary of Einstein's work and thoughts on electrody-
namics prior to 1905.
