The Special Theory of Relativity

Abstract

No single intellectual creation has so intrigued, excited, and challenged people in general as Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, surrounded as it is in the minds of most people by an aura of incomprehensibility, mathematical complexity, and strange but wonderful physical predictions that (it is generally believed) must be accepted on faith by the layman. That the theory, in spite of this almost mystical reaction to it, is still the one topic that most people first think of when modern science is discussed is an indication of the intellectual hold it has on people, so many years after its publication in 1905 when Einstein was an unknown young man working as a clerk and an examiner in the Swiss patent office. Since this theory is considered by many physicists to be the single greatest and most beautiful creation of the human mind, there is good reason for its preeminence among scientific theories in the mind of the layman, whose thinking about science is necessarily influenced and guided by the professional scientist.

The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.

—hermann minkowski, Space and Time