More Lost Papers

Lost Papers Dropping from the Page of Time

As promised, the translation of the paper that contains Einstein’s last important contribution to modern physics has been completed.   Paul Terlunen graciously provided the initial translation, and my wife Sara helped immensely with the final editing.

Starting point for this effort was the news that Einsteins hand-written manuscript had been re-discovered.  This has been reported in various physics LinkedIn groups, and subsequently there was some interest to look at this paper in an English translation, but there was none readily available.

This is the second part of Einstein’s publications on this topic and I will now start on a translation for the first paper as well.

Nevertheless, if you already have some familiarity with quantum mechanics, you can read this last paper without having worked through the previous one.  It is intriguing to follow the author’s line of thought, and to share in his intrigue with the puzzling nature of the quantum statistics that were uncovered for the first time. To the modern reader, it is also interesting to see in hindsight where Einstein erred when speculating on the nature of the electron gas; At the time, he did not know that his statistics only applied to bosons, and that electrons would turn out to be fermions.