RIP John Stachel (1928-2025)

[robphy]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stachel

https://www.einstein.caltech.edu/news/John-Stachel-first-CPAE-editor

It is with sorrow that we mourn the passing of Professor John Stachel. John was the first editor of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. He passed away, at the age of 97, on May 9, 2025.

https://www.einstein.caltech.edu/
https://www.einstein.caltech.edu/what-we-do/published-volumes
https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/

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100 Anos de Teoria da Relatividade (Legendado) Documentário
(&t=90s is the first of several comments by John Stachel throughout the video)


more videos at the Perimeter Institute: https://pirsa.org/speaker/john-stachel
(however, the audio quality isn't that great)

I'm not sure how much you can see of John Stachel in
https://michaelblackwoodproductions.com/project/working-with-einstein/ (I haven't seen it)

https://www.matmor.unam.mx/eventos/loops07/plen_abs.html#stachel
https://www.slideserve.com/elyse/it...nterpretations-of-quantum-theory-john-stachel

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How Did Einstein Discover Special Relativity? by John Stachel
This reprints an essay written ca. 1983, "'What Song the Syrens Sang': How Did Einstein Discover Special Relativity?" in John Stachel, Einstein from "B" to "Z".
https://history.aip.org/exhibits/einstein/essay-einstein-relativity.htm

'A Man of My Type': Editing the Einstein Papers
John Stachel
The British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Jan., 1987), pp. 57-66 (10 pages)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4026436?seq=1

Einstein from 'B' to 'Z' (2001)
https://www.amazon.com/Einstein-B-Z-John-Stachel/dp/0817641432?tag=pfamazon01-20

Revisiting the Foundations of Relativistic Physics: Festschrift in Honor of John Stachel
(Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, 234) (2003)
https://www.amazon.com/Revisiting-F...s-Festschrift/dp/1402012845?tag=pfamazon01-20

[update]
New Light on the Einstein-Hilbert Priority Question
Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy, Volume 20, Issue 3-4, pp. 91-101
https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1999JApA...20...91S , doi: 10.1007/BF02702345

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https://www.bu.edu/cphs/ces/research/john-stachel/

https://www.bu.edu/cphs/ces/research/papers-by-stachel/ (numerous Papers and Presentations by John Stachel)

• Doctoral Dissertation, Lie Derivatives and the Cauchy Problem in the General Theory of Relativity,
  Stevens Institute of Technology, N.J., 1962 (pdf)
• Mathematics Genealogy: https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=164103 (Stachel

https://link.springer.com/search?sortBy=newestFirst&dc.creator=JOHN STACHEL
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,24&q=john+stachel
https://philpeople.org/profiles/john-stachel
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/stachel/

• I met John Stachel briefly at the Minnowbrook Symposium on the Structure of Space-Time (near Syracuse NY, May 1999).
• Here's an old thread where Stachel came up in conversation:
  
  

  Graduate Post in thread 'Mass of Photon: Is 0 Rest Mass Possible?'

  Apr 21, 2006

  That was the first thing that I did. I had an expert GR historian (Dr. John Stachel, Boston Univ., former editor of the Einstein papers project) confirm it for me just to double check. I figured that'd be the first objection someone should bhring up. But that's not the only place. He mentioned the mass of light in the book he wrote with Infeld "The Evolution of Physics."

  
  Actually, he was one of the folks I had in mind who could check this. (Is he still at Boston U.?) From what I can tell, he's a nice guy with lots of interesting insights. Too bad I only get a brief...

  • robphy
• Here's my favorite paper by Stachel, which helped guide my interest in the spacetime structure of Galilean relativity:
  
  "If Maxwell had worked between Ampère and Faraday: An historical fable with a pedagogical moral"
  Max Jammer, John Stachel
  ( American Journal of Physics -- January 1980 -- Volume 48, Issue 1, pp. 5-7 , http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.12239 ),
  which is based on "Galilean electromagnetism" by LeBellac and Levy-Leblond (Nuovo Cim.B 14 (1973) 2, 217-234, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02895715 )

 

[jedishrfu]

more on the good professor at wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stachel

 

[Eric Baird]

... and three months after John died, Princeton University have shut down the free "Digital Einstein" site.

The new plan is that none of that content is going to be accessible online again until their new software contractor has built a new paywalled site to house it. 100% pay-per-view. Even libraries are going to have to pay. No open-access component, even for the material that's out of copyright.