Abstract

While a great scientist such as Albert Einstein may seem to work in another dimension of thought, Einstein struggled with converting that thought into words. He found a “model for scientific historical writing” in the work of Ernst Mach, an Austrian physicist. Mach's model, as modified by Einstein, takes the reader through the writer's thought processes—discovery of an anomaly, free variation of mental images, finding the invariant in those images, and the communication in words of the new concept. Einstein followed this model in his famous 1905 relativity paper, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies [1].