Item — HN Reader

My point is that each of the material above (and i forgot to add the original Quantum Mechanics papers) were major watershed moments in science/mathematics and hence are not easy to read/understand. You need a good background in the subject matter(and mathematics) and/or somebody guiding you through them.

So what i do is try and find books which are written for the "educated common reader" by an expert who guides you through the original paper/book. It is still difficult to understand if you do not have the necessary background but at least you have a good starting point.

Some books in my collection;

1) Newton's Principia for the Common Reader by S.Chandrasekhar

2) Maxwell on the Electromagnetic Field: A Guided Study (Masterworks of Discovery) by Thomas Simpson

3) Einstein's Miraculous Year by John Stachel.

4) The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold.

What we need is for a group of professors to get together and start writing a series on explaining the original papers to the "educated common reader" i.e. not too trivial nor too overwhelming. I think there is a huge market for this since it humanizes how science is done in real life which is fundamental for motivation.

2 comments

The Annotated Turing is great. Thanks for mentioning the others, I'll check them out. I've read a little of Einstein's original work (in longish excerpts) and it was a nice enough read I'd welcome more of it, especially with expert guidance.

You might also want to look at The Annotated Godel by Hal Prince which i mention in another comment.

We should read the original great works but with intellectual honesty to accept that some/most of it might be over our heads (depending on one's background) and not feel ashamed about it. The point is to not be completely clueless/ignorant but at least have some correct ideas even if it is a simplification/approximation. It is just one stage in the learning process and as we re-read little-by-little over time we begin to understand more and more. This is real education.

> My point is that each of the material above (and i forgot to add the original Quantum Mechanics papers) were major watershed moments in science/mathematics and hence are not easy to read/understand.

I must dissent. Einstein's Annus Mirabilis papers are really quite approachable. You don't need a book to guide you through.

Though if you are having fun with the book, more power to you! Enjoy!

We have to agree to disagree then. You definitely need a good background in Physics to understand them.

For a general reader, even though they might not get the whole thing they can still get an appreciation for the whole from the commentary/details added by the editor.

The book contains the English translations of the 5 papers with Einstein's original introduction and a short discussion on each, a informative introduction and a foreword by Roger Penrose.

Oh, the book is probably good and entertaining! It's just not necessary, if you paid attention in high school.

> if you paid attention in high school.

A very hard Nope!

No high school teaches you Electrodynamics at the level needed to understand his Relativity/Photoelectric-effect papers, the idea of Stochastic Randomness behind Kinetic theory/Brownian motion etc. You need both background physics theory and the mathematical tools.

For your edification see;

John Stachel: Einstein papers - https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/february-2005/john-...

Annus Mirabilis Papers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_mirabilis_papers

You can read the original photoelectric effect paper at https://myweb.rz.uni-augsburg.de/~eckern/adp/history/einstei...

It's a bit more involved than the one about Brownian motion, but it's still fairly accessible for the motivated layman.

I'm not sure why you are so convinced that this is so hard. Nor what you are trying to convince me that I should find it hard: I've literally had a look at the German originals. No amount of secondary or tertiary writing is going to overrule that.

Schools differ in what they teach, of course. And many of them aren't very good. But Wikipedia is always available and these days you can ask your favourite LLM for explanations, too.

Of course, as I said already, the books you are suggesting are probably great and fun to read. They just aren't necessary.

I am now beginning to suspect that you are validating the skepticism that i expressed in my original comment. You have been pretty cavalier about your claims (a high school student, really?) which cannot be accepted at face value.

As already mentioned, I already have the english translations of all the five papers, have spent some time with them, and they most certainly are not "accessible for the motivated layman" without the necessary physics/mathematics background. No amount of motivation/enthusiasm can make up for lack of necessary knowledge.

Since you kept mentioning the brownian motion paper as being "easy to read", the second section on "osmotic pressure from the standpoint of the moleculer-kinetic theory of heat" starts with the equations for entropy and free energy of the system which i would like to see a "motivated layman"/"high school student" understand, much less derive. They need knowledge of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics (assuming they are already comfortable with multivariable calculus/PDEs) to even get started.

Similar criticisms apply to the rest of your claims regarding other papers.

That is why you need guidance from teachers who do have knowledge of all the required sub-domains and can help the student navigate the paper. Of course one can also use all other available tools like LLMs etc. but their veracity again needs to be checked by a human in conceptually complex subjects like these.