100 Years of Special Relativity

phrotoma writes "Wikipedia notes in their Selected Anniversaries section that today marks the 100th anniversary of Albert Eintein's publication of the third of his four Annus Mirabilis Papers entitled On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies; the seminal work that introduced the concepts which would come to be known as Special Relativity. This event is also being commemorated in a UN endorsed celebration of physics: World Physics Year 2005 with talks and events at public schools, museums, and universities the world over."

Comments

Three cheers for the public domain.

[Anonymous Coward]

And just think -- under today's copyright laws of life+70, these papers would still be under copyright until 2025. Wikipedia is able to publish these today because copyright law was more sane a century ago.

I am sorry, nothing deserves 120 years of copyright protection. I doubt almost anything needs even 28 years. I weep for those who will be looking back 100 years from now.

This is just one third of the World Year

[hubie]

The World Year of Physics is celebrating the year that Einstein put out three of his best papers: Special Relativity, brownian motion, and the photoelectric effect. In addition to the importance of relativity, he also confirmed the existence of atoms with the brownian motion paper, and the existence of quantized energy with the photoelectric effect.

That was one hell of a year. Any one of those would have established his reputation, but all three, and in the same year!!

Moving backwards

[ggambett]

100 years ago Einstein was publishing his theory. Today we're discussing intelligent design and how the dinosaurs attacked Noah's ark. Why do I feel we're going backwards? (low res images because of Slashdotting, I guess... can't find a high res version)

Re:Einstein's centenary - big in the UK

[rumblin'rabbit]

Einstein fled Germany in 1933 when fascism and anti-semitism become intolerable. Indeed, Einstein may have died in a concentration camp had he stayed. Thus Germany's handling of one of the great scientists of all time is not a proud one.

Perhaps that is why they are hesitant. Brings up bad memories.

Re:100 Years

[drsquare]

It happens with all vaguely-science related articles. Most Slashdotters are just kids who've managed to install Linux, they don't know much about science and technology. So when an article like this comes up, they've nothing informed to say. But they treat Slashdot as a chatroom, the social life they don't get in the real world. And they're desperate for attention, so they HAVE to post. Even if they have nothing to say. Especially if they have nothing to say.

So we have kids, desperate to get a +5 funny to validate themselves, on an article they know nothing about. So what do they do? They try posting something 'hilarious', like a play on words of something in the article, or something starting with 'Did anyone else read this as...', or a reference to one of the tired slashdot memes, as if quoting Douglas Adams makes them one of the Slashdot 'in crowd'.

It ruins it for the rest of us, as on any science article, we have to scroll half way down the page to get to the first person who actually says something relevent to the article.