[exmadscientist]

In contrast, Einstein on (special) relativity is excellent. I haven't revisited them since my undergrad days, but I remember being surprised by just how clear and direct the original papers were. Much easier to understand than many modern attempts! The terminology is a bit outdated in places (such as, if I'm remembering right, what you call the mass term γ m₀), but that's not hard to deal with.

[bmitc]

Yea, Einstein’s papers and a lot of those early 20th century physics papers are surprisingly quite readable, even for a moderate layman such as myself. Because of this, I must say I find Carroll’s claim that he’s never read one of Einstein’s relativity papers a bit dubious.

Dirac’s paper on magnetic monopoles contains a rather beautiful and general introduction on progress in physics. I highly recommend it.

http://users.physik.fu-berlin.de/~kleinert/files/dirac1931.p...