Brownian motion describes the irregular motion of a body arising from the thermal energy of the molecules of the material in which the body is immersed. The movement had first been observed by the Scottish botanist Robert Brown in 1827. The explanation of this phenomenon has to do with the Kinetic Theory of Matter, and it was the American Josiah Gibbs and the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann who first explained this occurrence, not Albert Einstein. In fact, the mathematical equation describing the motion contains the famous Boltzmann constant, k. Between these two men, they had explained by the 1890s everything in Einstein’s 1905 paper regarding Brownian motion.
E=MC2
The subject of the equivalence of mass and energy was contained in a third paper published by Einstein in 1905. This concept is expressed by the famous equation E=mc2. Einstein’s biographers categorize this as “his most famous and most spectacular conclusion.” Even though this idea is an obvious conclusion of Einstein’s earlier relativity paper, it was not included in that paper but was published as an afterthought later in the year. Still, the idea of energy-mass equivalence was not original with Einstein.
That there was an equivalence between mass and energy had been shown in the laboratory in the 1890s by both J.J. Thomsom of Cambridge and by W. Kaufmann in Göttingen. In 1900, Poincaré had shown that there was a mass relationship for all forms of energy, not just electromagnetic energy. Yet, the most probable source of Einstein’s plagiarism was Friedrich Hasenöhrl, one of the most brilliant, yet unappreciated physicists of the era. Hasenöhrl was the teacher of many of the German scientists who would later become famous for a variety of topics. He had worked on the idea of the equivalence of mass and energy for many years and had published a paper on the topic in 1904 in the very same journal which Einstein would publish his plagiarized version in 1905. For his brilliant work in this area, Hasenörhl had received in 1904 a prize from the prestigious Vienna Academy of Sciences.
Furthermore, the mathematical relationship of mass and energy was a simple deduction from the already well-known equations of Scottish physicist James Maxwell. Scientists long understood that the mathematical relationship expressed by the equation E=MC2 was the logical result of Maxwell’s work, they just did not believe it.
THUS, THE EXPERIMENTS OF THOMSON, KAUFMANN, AND FINALLY, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, HASENÖRHL, CONFIRMED MAXWELL’S WORK. IT IS LUDICROUS TO BELIEVE THAT EINSTEIN DEVELOPED THIS POSTULATE, particularly in light of the fact that Einstein did not have the laboratory necessary to conduct the appropriate experiments. In this same plagiarized article of Einstein’s, he suggested to the scientific community, “Perhaps it will prove possible to test this theory using bodies whose energy content is variable to a high degree (e.g., salts of radium).” This remark demonstrates how little Einstein understood about science, for this was truly an outlandish remark. By saying this, Einstein showed that he really did not understand basic scientific principles and that he was writing about a topic that he did not understand. In fact, in response to this article, J. Precht remarked that such an experiment “lies beyond the realm of possible experience.”
