Item — HN Reader

> 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

1 comments

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.