Einstein’s Paper on the Photoelectric Effect (1905)
The paper that earned Einstein the Nobel Prize
About six weeks before he submitted his doctoral thesis at the University of Zürich in 1905, Einstein on March 18th submitted the paper ‘Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichttspunkt’ (“On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light”) to Annalen der Physik, the world’s premier physics journal at the time. In the paper, Einstein proposes the existence of energy quanta, light particles now called photons, motivated by Max Planck’s earlier derivation of Planck’s law of black body radiation.
He was 26 years old at the time.
This week’s newsletter discusses the contents of Einstein’s Nobel Prize-winning paper, including derivations of his arguments based on the wonderful paper:
Pais, A. 1979. “Einstein an…
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