THE NEW KINEMATICS 153Early in 1912, Wilhelm Wien, Nobel laureate in physics for 1911, wrote to
Stockholm to make the following recommendation for the year 1912:* 'I propose
to award the prize in equal shares to H. A. Lorentz in Leiden and A. Einstein in
Prague. As my motivation for this proposal, I would like to make the following
observations. The principle of relativity has eliminated the difficulties which
existed in electrodynamics and has made it possible to predict for a moving system
all electromagnetic phenomena which are known for a system at rest.' After enu-
merating some features of the theory he continued, 'From a purely logical point
of view, the relativity principle must be considered as one of the most significant
accomplishments ever achieved in theoretical physics. Regarding the confirmation
of the theory by experiment, in this respect the situation resembles the experi-
mental confirmation of the conservation of energy. [Relativity] was discovered in
an inductive way, after all attempts to detect absolute motion had failed.... While
Lorentz must be considered as the first to have found the mathematical content of
the relativity principle, Einstein succeeded in reducing it to a simple principle.
One should therefore assess the merits of both investigators as being
comparable....'
Then and later the special theory would have its occasional detractors. How-
ever, Wien's excellent account shows that it had taken the real pros a reasonably
short time to realize that the special theory of relativity constituted a major
advance.7d. Einstein and the Special Theory After 1905
The fifth section of Einstein's review paper on relativity, completed in 1907, deals
with gravitation and contains this statement: 'The principle of the constancy of
the light velocity can be used also here [i.e., in the presence of gravitation] for the
definition of simultaneity, provided one restricts oneself to very small light paths'
[E3]. Einstein already knew then that the special theory was only a beginning
(see Chapter 9). This largely explains why the special theory per se soon faded
from the center of his interests. Also, he was not one to follow up on his main
ideas with elaborations of their detailed technical consequences. In addition, from
1908 until some time in 1911 the quantum theory rather than relativity was
uppermost in his mind (see Chapter 10).
Apart from review articles and general lectures, Einstein's work on the conse-
quences of the special theory was over by 1909. I shall confine myself to giving a
short chronology of his post-1905 papers on this subject. This work is discussed
and set in context by Pauli [PI, P2].
- Discussion of center-of-gravity motion in special relativity [E10] (see
especially [Ml] for a detailed discussion of this subject).
*See Chapter 30.