Einstein's 1905 Paper on Special Relativity
von Bob

This is just an amusing story.  Interesting on several levels, the least of which is science.

In the summer I started reading a book called "The Scientist as Philosopher" by Friedel Weinert. I think I am the one who almost read all of it. Basically it went through a discussion of how various people viewed time:

 At this point, not that I grasped the all the various views, but it seemed that Weinert was too liberal with special relativity. Everything was dilating or contracting with far reaching consequences. What does something look like when it is moving towards you?

From here I decided to derive the basic transformations of special relativity. The usual textbook scenario uses two reference frames . For the sake of argument one moving relative to the other in uniform linear motion. These are usually trains for some reason. Anyway the event considered is that of a beam of light being shown from the floor or the car to the ceiling and back. To the person moving with the train the event takes a time which is 2h/c. The "stationary" observer however sees a longer light path and hence records a longer elapsed or dilated time. Once you have time dilation length, contraction is a consequence.

Fine, but I am at the lake and don't want to use Pythagoras's theorem. My event instead will be a beam of light shown longitudinally down the car. No obvious time dilation, perhaps unless you assume length contraction. That seemed unsettling, an event should not really be dependent upon a particular type of clock.

I start looking through introductory physics books, and they are all the same. It was then that I was told that perhaps I should look over Einstein's 1905 paper as apparently it has very little math and is easy to read.

Google "1905 Einstein Special relativity". My second reference from the search is a link to a pdf of an English translation of the paper. Excellent, print it out and start going over what is considered a seminal paper in the area of relativity. Two problems arose.
Dealing with the typo. Well I know systems of units tend to change with the times. Definitely in physics anyway, for example I think in the past c was equal to 1. But this typo still looked like seconds minus meters.  Fortunately, on the web we can even get the original version in German. This you can get from wikipedia. Download the original German, great it's (x-vt).

The fun stuff. Firstly I begin checking which schools are hosting the seminal paper with the typo.  About half, so I began an email campaign to inform web sites of the importance of hosting the correct version of a "seminal" paper. Most are appreciative of the email, others even acknowledging that they are aware of the typo!  The most recent one I came across is the 3rd or 4th link after a Google search. Anyway it is at Cavendish Labs, Cambridge, no less. Part of a physics course. Anyway after I pointed this out. The Professor in charge indicated that it is still likely best to provide the typo version of the paper as it is in a convenient format (pdf) and that he will just indicate in class the typo. Fine, except not everyone on the web is taking that course. I then supplied him with the typo free version. I suspect they are still hosting the typo version.

Another typo, or more appropriately a translation error. In 1922 the English version also included a typo. This was where a description of a figure coming towards you at a speed comparable to that of light will look "plain", the intend was for it to look "plane".  That observation was included in a footnote. This typo or translation error is pointed out in the paper with the typo in a footnote.

On to the most fun. The "derivation" of the Lorentz transformation equations from Einstein's postulates. Every time I derive the transformation equations following Einstein's derivation I consistently get an extra Lorentz transformation term.

References:
The original German Version: pdf.
The "plain" 1922 English Version: pdf
The "(t-vt)" English Version: pdf
The "(x-vt)" English Version: pdf
My Derivations: In preparation, hey it's not easy typing equations in Framemaker.

One last thing that amazed me about this story is that no one appears surprised.

Ramifications: Definitely I am attempting to remove the typo versions of Einstein's 1905 translated paper. That's good. I suspect Einstein basically wrote down equations, known to be correct and worked backwards to his postulates. That's fine, the problem lies with the derivation. If I am wrong with the algebra, no real embarrassment, so Albert was right and my algebra rusty. If Albert was wrong, considerably more embarrassing for both of us.