During 1905, the physics graduate Albert Einstein, while employed as a patent examiner in Bern, Switzerland, submitted 5 papers to the German journal Annalen der Physik. They all contained breakthroughs in understanding major physics problems of the day. One wonders how much effort he was putting into his day job!
Several years ago, I decided I'd like to read and to try and understand these papers, and searched the WWW, presuming these most significant works would be gathered, translated and annotated on some Einstein homage website. No such luck!
In 2004, UNESCO declared 2005 as the International Year of Physics, and after some brawling , this was endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly. The impetus was to celebrate Einstein's Miraculous Year, so-named after Newton's reference to his own stellar year of 1666. Good, thought I, at least some august body in the physics community will organise translations and a commentary on a web page, to honour the year and promote physics. No such luck! Scientists don't have a clue about self-promotion!
Luckily John Stachel has given us the book "Einstein's miraculous year: five papers that changed the face of physics" (Princeton University Press, 1998). The amazing thing about these papers is that they are more or less comprehensible to someone with high-school physics/math.
Schadenfreude - Stachel notes there are simple math and notation errors in the Special Relativity paper! Einstein was human after all!
For instance:
In Section 7, "for v = -c, f = ∞" should be "for v = -c, f = -∞"
In Section 8,
should be
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