History
Einstein’s Miraculous Year Born in Ulm, Germany on 14 March 1879, Einstein was fascinated by the mysteries of nature from a young age. However, he resented the rote learning that dominated his school curriculum, preferring instead to construct and solve his own simple algebraic problems from scratch. Despite his disdain for formalised schooling, his aptitude for mathematics was quickly recognised by his teachers and in 1896 won him a place at the prestigious Swiss Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zürich to study physics. He was not particularly diligent when it came to attending lectures, leading one of his tutors to describe him as “a lazy dog…[who] never bothered about mathematics at all.” Unfortunately, this assessment of the young Einstein was shared by other members of the university staff and meant that when he graduated in 1900, he was unable to secure a job at the Institute as he had intended. Einstein spent several years teaching physics and maths here and there, before landing a position at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern after some string-pulling by a former school friend.The job was perfect for Einstein: not being that much of a challenge for him, it provided ample time to think about physics! It was here at the patent office that he was to develop and publish some of his most famous ideas.
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I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. - Albert Einstein
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Einstein’s annus mirabilis arrived in 1905 when, at the age of just 26 and still with only an undergraduate degree in physics to his name, he published a series of papers that would revolutionise the field of physics. He would later say of this time that it was as if “a storm broke loose in my mind.” Certainly, Einstein’s activities this year were characterised by a furious productivity: the three key papers which were to make this young scientist’s name were all published within just fifteen weeks.
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Robert Gottschalk
Emily Tweed takes a look at the ideas that made Albert Einstein an international icon
The first of these papers gave a new account of the nature of light, an account able to explain a tricky physical puzzle, called the photoelectric effect, that had been troubling physicists for years. In this paper, Einstein proposed that light was not a wave as traditionally thought, but instead consisted of tiny, discrete packets of energy called photons.This paper was to form the basis of the modern discipline of quantum mechanics and to win Einstein the Nobel Prize for physics in 1921. The second publication detailed Einstein’s explanation of the phenomenon known as Brownian motion: the random and jerky movement of smoke particles in air, or pollen grains in water. Einstein showed that this motion was due to the particles being constantly bombarded from all sides by other moving particles, and in doing so convinced many scientists of the existence of atoms and molecules. While the atomic theory of matter is something we take for granted nowadays, before Einstein’s paper this theory lacked experimental evidence and was doubted by a significant section of the scientific community. The third paper produced by Einstein in 1905 was perhaps the most revolutionary of all, containing the theory of special relativity. So what was so special about special relativity? Relativity as a concept originated with Galileo, who recognised that all motion is relative and cannot be detected without reference to an outside point. For example, if you
were travelling on an aeroplane you would not be able to tell whether or not the aeroplane was moving without looking outside. Einstein built on these ideas to show that the laws of physics and the speed of light are universal constants, and thus that space and time are not absolute as previously thought. This innocuous-seeming theory has some radical and far-fetched implications. For instance, the faster you travel relative to the speed of light, the more time slows down! However, as Einstein himself once said, “If at first an idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” Special relativity was also to provide the foundation for another of the ground-breaking breakthroughs that Einstein made this year: the theory of mass-energy equivalence, better known as E=mc2. For an explanation of the significance of this legendary formula, see Andy Hodge’s article, E = mc2, on the next page.
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The most incomprehensible fact about the universe is that it is comprehensible - Albert Einstein
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What is especially amazing about Einstein’s work in 1905 is that all these discoveries were made while he was working alone at the patent office, isolated from other physicists and from the
Lent 2005