480
EINSTEIN ON LENGTH CONTRACTION
Einstein's mind
as an
unsolved
problem.
For
him, however,
the
key
problem lay
not
in
the notion of
the rigid body, but,
as
he
pointed out
in
a
letter
to Sommerfeld,
in the
treatment
of accelerated frames of reference and hence
in
the
generalization
of
the
principle
of
relativity.[15]
[15]Einstein
to
Arnold
Sommerfeld,
29
September 1909.
For
an
account
of the role of
the
rigidly rotating
disk
in
Einstein's
work
toward
his general theory
of
relativity,
see
Stachel
1980.
Calculations
apparently
related to this
problem
are
found
in Einstein's Scratch Notebook
(Appendix
A),
[p.
66].
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