Abstract

Although Einstein's name is closely linked with the celebrated relation E = mc2 between mass and energy, a critical examination of the more than half dozen ?proofs? of this relation that Einstein produced over a span of forty years reveals that all these proofs suffer from mistakes. Einstein introduced unjustified assumptions, committed fatal errors in logic, or adopted low-speed, restrictive approximations. He never succeeded in producing a valid general proof applicable to a realistic system with arbitrarily large internal speeds. The first such general proof was produced by Max Laue in 1911 (for ?closed? systems with a timeindependent energy-momentum tensor) and it was generalized by Felix Klein in 1918 (for arbitrary timedependent ?closed? systems).