If a person has a good grounding in classical mechanics, electrodynamics and special relativity, is Einstein's 1916 paper a recommended way of learning about the subject?
After looking through it briefly, I like what I see because he explains all about tensors from first principles. On the other hand, I'm not too sure if his commentary on the following is outdated:
No. It is not a good starting point. If nothing else, modern notation is very different from Einstein's original notation. Old notation left a lot to be desired about separating tensors from tensor components, if nothing else.
There has also been a lot of new insight into topology, surface charges, the action principle, the nature of black holes and exact solutions to Einstein's equations, and gravitational radiation, amongst many other things, over the past 100 years. If you would like, i could generate a list of better starting books, depending on your beginning fluency with math/physics.
Yes.
Some of the commentary may be outdated, but you can gain a lot of perspective. What problem was he solving, where did he come from, what was the thinking at the time, what was the available data, etc. You also get a good, short, concise introduction to the subject, and older scientific papers tend to be more readable and fun than modern ones.
You will read a standard textbook like Wald anyways, read the Einstein papers for fun!
Finally, if you're going to be a research scientist, it's a good reference point how to write your own papers =)
I personally would suggest learning General Relativity from a more standard Textbook rather than choosing Einsteins papers.
I will however recommend reading his papers after you have had an introduction to the subject, as it will give you interesting historical insights and appreciation of the subject.
Read Einstein! However, be aware that he was using a volume-fixing gauge sometimes in those papers, and did not do a first-principles exposition which was completely gauge-free until a review article some years later (I am saying this from memory, I don't remember the content of the original article very well, but I remember there was a very lucid later review by Einstein, and I did read an elementary textbook first). The best source in my opinion is Dirac's General Relativity book, because it's the shortest. Textbooks tend to say way too much, making it impossible to slog through them. General Relativity is not a big subject if you just get off the ground, it can be done by high school students. The interesting modern stuff is covered in a slightly too-formal way in Hawking and Ellis.
Einstein was an uebermensch ... and I do recommend beginning with his original paper.
I also recommend the review of his paper by a modern scholar, prof. Michel Jannssenn
"Of pots and holes: Einstein's bumpy road to general relativity" in: Annalen der Physik 14, Supplement, 58-85 (2005), freely available in the wrong typefaces at
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/2123/, but only after you read Einstein's paper.
see also his home page http://www.tc.umn.edu/~janss011/
although he might be wrong on the Einstein--Hilbert controversy which has been cooked up recently.
I don't study General Relativity, but I've always found the original work a bad place to start learning something for the first time. First of all, the work may discuss the development of previous work that contributes to the current conclusions, and this will be problematic for the first time reader. For example, the idea of Cooper pairs or electron lattice coupling were developed long before the BCS theory of superconductivity was developed. If I wanted to learn about BCS theory, the BCS PR paper would be a bad place to start my learning process. Second, the first paper about a new phenomena probably contains things that are incomplete, or even flat out incorrect, and may be misleading. I would definitely recommend a text book or at least a review paper before the original paper, particularly for a relatively mature subject like GR, or a subject under the umbrella of a beast like condensed matter.
Sure, you should always look at the source. What comes after Einstein is not as revolutionary as what he defined, as far as I know. Then again, all people gets corrected with time :) And Einstein was a mere human, not any 'übermench', although incredibly daring in his thoughts. But to get the feeling of what he saw you need his own words, not those 'interpreting' him later. That will allow you a first hand impression, and a deeper understanding later of where the changes comes to be between his original ideas and the way it is described today.
Well, as I see it.
The Einstein Princeton lectures of 1921 may be a better starting point. He did there a great effort to present the material in a more pedagogical way, full of heuristic insights. Also, the formalism is somewhat closer to nowadays texts.
They are published in english under the title "The Principle of Relativity", and in german under "Grundzüge der Relativitätstheorie" (Springer). Both versions come with two interesting appendices Einstein wrote much later (in the early 50s I think), the first is about cosmology, the second is his last scientific paper ("Relativistische Theorie des nicht symmetrischen Feldes" - Relativistic Theory of the Non-Symmetric Field). A LaTeX transcription of the english text of the lectures (without the appendices) is now available for free in the Gutenberg Project site.
It is a great text to grasp a little bit how was Einstein brilliant heuristic thinking, and it is not quite difficult to study, at least when compared to the 1916 Annalen der Physik paper.
NOTE: Not to be confused with another different book Einstein wrote, called "Relativity - The Special and the General Theory", which is merely a popular, non-mathematical introduction to Special Relativity (nice, of course, for readers with other interests - there you find the famous explanation of simultaneity with the train and the light flashes, for instance)
