Einsteins light-beam thought experiments and relativity

How could we be anything but charmed by the delightful story Einstein tells in his Autobiographical Notes of a striking thought he had at the age of 16? While recounting the efforts that led to the special theory of relativity, he recalled · "...a paradox upon which I had already hit at the age of sixteen: If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest though spatially oscillating.

Writing a half century later in 1946 in his Autobiographical Notes, Einstein recounted a thought experiment conducted while he was a 16 year old student in 1896 that marked his first steps towards special relativity. "...a paradox upon which I had already hit at the age of sixteen: If I pursue ...

therefore regard the wide-spread belief that Einstein had an inborn trust in the relativity principle · as a myth. In fact, he originally believed in the Maxwell’s electromagnetic ether.” Citing · Darrigol’s analysis, Marc Lange (2002, p. 201) reviews the difficulties of reading Einstein’s · thought experiment as a prompt in a list of discussion questions. He asks, provocatively, “Is · Einstein’s famous argument from ‘riding on a beam of light’ flawed?” but does not apparently

Norton, who has published extensively ... ultimate discovery.” · In the thought experiment, Einstein imagined himself pursuing a beam of light (a waveform) at velocity C (the velocity of light in a vacuum)....

THIS month marks the 100th anniversary ... take a moment to celebrate the visualized “thought experiments” that were the navigation lights guiding Albert Einstein to his brilliant creation....

Here, watch animations of Einstein chasing a light beam (which helped lead him to his theory of special relativity) and riding an elevator in free-fall (which convinced him that gravity and acceleration are one and the same).

He would recall excitedly, "The solution came to me suddenly with the thought that our concepts and laws of space and time can only claim validity insofar as they stand in a clear relation to our experiences.... By a revision of the concept of simultaneity into a more malleable form, I thus arrived at the theory of relativity." Thank you, I've completely solved the problem. For example, remember that in the paradox of the speeding motorist, the police officer was traveling neck and neck with the speeding light beam, while the officer himself claimed that the light beam was speeding away from him at precisely the speed of light, no matter how much he gunned his engines.

A hallmark of Albert Einstein's ... issues and for elucidating his concepts to others. Einstein's thought experiments took diverse forms. In his youth, he mentally chased beams of light. For special relativity, he employed moving trains and flashes of lightning to explain ...

The whole Einstein light clock thought experiment has now been proven to have been based entirely on a misconception, because we obviously would be able to see a light clock moving at up to 1 m for every cycle and that would require the clock ...