http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/warwick1.htm
http://www.forrestbishop.mysite.com/OHM/Heaviside_the_Man.htm
“Masters of Theory; Cambridge and the rise
of Mathematical Physics”
by Andrew
Warwick, 2003
Extract.
8.1 A letter from Einstein
Sometime during the winter of 1908-9, G.F.C. Searle
(28W 1887), a graduate of the Mathematical Tripos and Demonstrator in
experimental physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, received a letter from Albert
Einstein, then still a technical expert at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. Einstein’s
letter contained a copy of a review article he had written in 1907 on the
principle of relativity and its consequences. …. …. (after delay), Searle found
time to study the paper, but, when he finally did so, he made little headway.
Writing to his friend Oliver Heaviside in early March 1909, Searle mentioned
the paper and confided that he had “no idea” what the “principle [of
relativity]” was. Two months later Searle wrote to Einstein himself thanking
him for the paper but added apologetically that neither he nor any of his Cambridge
acquaintances could “gain any really clear idea as to the principles involved
or as to their meaning.”
…. ….
There are several reasons why Searle’s brief exchange
with Einstein is an appropriate episode with which to open a discussion of the early
Cambridge reception of relativity. Searle is the only British physicist to the
best of my knowledge to have corresponded with Einstein on the subject before
1919. His receipt of a paper both by and from Einstein also makes
him the only British physicist to have “received” relativity in the literal
sense; that is, to have had it brought directly to his attention by the author
as a new approach to electrodynamics that was worthy of study. Searle is thus a unique
historical figure in Cambridge physics from the first decade of the twentieth
century, in that we know he received and actually read Einstein’s work, and
form whom we have a brief, firsthand account of his
immediate response. It is moreover the nature of this response that is
of greatest significance to our present concerns. Given the radical and
revolutionary status subsequently bestowed upon Einstein’s work of 1905, one
might assume that it made quite a stir among his peers at the time. Yet if
Searle’s remarks are anything to go by, it was greeted, at least in Britain,
with a mixture of indifference and incomprehension.
“Einstein the Joker.” http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x7b71.pdf
Written by Heaviside