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...