Einstein’s Generation: The Origins of the Relativity Revolution (review)

The title of this book has a dual meaning. On one hand, Einstein’s Generation is a study of the physics community in the decades around 1900. On the other, it investigates the historical generation of the notion of Einstein’s work as marking a shift from classical to modern physics. The categories “modern” and “classical” were, for Richard Staley, products of intense conversation and contestation over several years, particularly between theorists and experimentalists. They were, moreover, a “co-creation” (chapter 9) in which working physicists created particularistic, even tendentious historical narratives to reinforce their interpretations of contemporary work. In other words, Staley analyzes how a generation of physicists, through a kind of sifting process, generated a “professional memory” of the historical significance of relativity and quantum theories. His goal is to recover the range of possibilities from before this sifting took place.

The first part of the book (after a methodological introduction) focuses on Albert A. Michelson. Staley places Michelson’s ether drift experiment into a trajectory of research culminating in Michelson’s efforts to perfect the interferometer as a precision instrument and thereby establish light wavelengths as an absolute standard of measurement. This quest for precise, absolute standards constituted an overarching theme of Michelson’s research, in association with interested parties ranging from astronomers to machine-tool manufacturers. The question of the ether thus appears as only one piece of a more complex scientific agenda. These two chapters could almost stand alone as a case study of the un-sifting that Staley proposes.

Part 2 shifts from the individual to the global, with two chapters on the 1900 Paris World’s Fair and the associated International Congress of Physics. Just as the fair showcased electricity and its applications, the physics congress showcased the electron as an exciting and distinctly modern target of research. While various countries had successful presentations, the Germans, according to Staley, won plaudits (and envy) for their well-organized, systematic contributions, and likewise took the lead in assimilating international perspectives. It remains a bit unclear what Staley wants the reader to take away from this section, since he concedes that the congress left little mark on the actual work of physicists.

The third section places Einstein’s 1905 publications in the immediate context of the contemporary physics literature. Staley sees not a “reception” of relativity theory, the significance of which was immediately clear, but a process of challenge and reinterpretation. Walter Kaufmann’s experiments on the electromagnetic mass of the electron—which Staley places in the tradition of precise and absolute measurement—were seen as damaging to the “Lorentz-Einstein” theory (as it was commonly then denominated), before challenges to Kaufmann’s results began to emerge. Theorists such as Max Born and Hermann Minkowski became adherents of the theory on mathematical grounds, in Born’s case almost reluctantly. In Staley’s account, it was Max Planck and Max von Laue who pushed Einstein’s theory onto the pedestal of a singular, epochal accomplishment.

The final section of the book analyzes the first practioners’ narratives which placed the new theory into a specific historical framework, and thus generated an opposed notion of classical physics, glossing over the intense dynamism and self-conscious modernity of pre-relativity and pre-quantum physics. For Staley, the event which more than anything codified this narrative was the first Solvay Congress of 1911 which, in contrast to the sprawling 1900 gathering, was an elite, almost pre-engineered affair, with the well-organized Germans again taking the lead. Classical physics was thus—with the possible exception of Ludwig Boltzmann—a “myth” or even a “false image of the past” as Staley asserts in his final sentence (p. 422).

The historiographical payoff at the end is thus stated in bold, almost moralistic terms. To get to it, Staley engages in a degree of zigzagging, foreshadowing, and retrospection which can make it hard to keep hold of the thread of the argument. Nevertheless...