I read two papers by Eugene Hecht on how Einstein discovered and confirmed E = mc2. Hecht did a nice job, in my opinion, in explaining what we know about Einstein’s path to the result. I was somewhat surprised to find out that Einstein did not manage to produce a general derivation of E = mc2. In fact, Hecht claims that no one has done so! Well, it is really not a problem as there is vast amount of empirical evidence for it.
It seems to me that Hecht’s work is quite close to doing honest historical research instead of portraying a smoothed version of the process of discovery (this is a valuable distinction I have learned from John Denker).
The latter (AJP paper) is a more technical account. It turns out that it can be downloaded for free elsewhere (google it :-)).
Regards,
Antti Savinainen, PhD
Finland
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