ABSTRACT
The initial impetus for the development of the theory of relativity in 20th century physics seems to have come when the curiosity of a 16-year old boy led him to ask a question about the nature of light. According to its most recent description, in the year 1895, light was known to propagate, maximally in a vacuum, at a speed of about thirty billion centimetres per second. Young Albert Einstein then wondered if it might be possible to see a light beam standing still, by travelling parallel to it at the same speed. To answer the question he had to determine the nature of the solution of Maxwell’s equations for light, as described from a reference frame that moves parallel to a light beam at the speed of light. He anticipated that this analysis would then reveal the formal description of light at rest.
