8vo. Half-title. (Some dampstaining near upper margin, rear joint starting, folding table and illustration detached.) Contemporary quarter cloth, printed wrap-around labels on spine, decorative boards (rubbing to extremities, few faint splits along spine). Provenance: Polytechnischer Verein (institutional stamps on title-page); Christian Heuer (bookplate).

THE EQUIVALENCE OF ENERGY AND MATTER: THE FIRST STATEMENT OF E=MC2. 

FIRST EDITION, journal issue. "A few months after first publishing the theory of relativity, Einstein discovered something that particularly intrigued him; the relation between inertial mass and energy. He wrote to Conrad Habicht during the summer of 1905: 'One more consequence of the paper on electrodynamics has also occurred to me. The principle of relativity, in conjunction with Maxwell's equations, requires that mass be a direct measure of the energy contained in a body; light carries mass with it. A noticeable decrease of mass should occur in the case of radium. The argument is amusing and seductive, but for all I know the Lord might be laughing over it and leading me around by the nose.'" (Stachel, Einstein's Miraculous Year, 117-18). Fourteen years later, however, Einstein wrote that mass-energy equivalence is “the most important upshot of the Special Theory of Relativity.” The equivalence has indeed become a foundational principle of physics. E=mc2, which formulaically expresses the mass-energy equivalence, can accurately be said to be the most famous scientific equation of all time. ONE OF EINSTEIN'S MOST FAMOUS AND IMPORTANT PAPERS. FROM HIS MIRACLE YEAR 1905. Weil 10.