This paper explores the evolution of Einstein’s understanding of mass and energy. Early on, Einstein embraced the idea of a speed-dependent mass but changed his mind in 1906 and thereafter carefully avoided that notion entirely. He shunned, and explicitly rejected, what later came to be known as “relativistic mass.” Nonetheless many textbooks and articles credit him with the relation , where is the total energy, is the relativistic mass, and is the vacuum speed of light. Einstein never derived this relation, at least not with that understanding of the meaning of its terms. He consistently related the “rest energy” of a system to its invariant inertial mass.
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72.
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74.
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.© 2009 American Association of Physics Teachers.
2009
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