By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. And to cap it off, in September 1905 Einstein derived a consequence of special relativity, an equation that would become the world's most famous: E = mc 2. In June he completed the special theory of relativity, revealing that space and time behave in astonishing ways no one had ever anticipated-in short, that distances, speeds and durations are all relative depending on the observer. Two months later, in May, Einstein's calculations provided testable predictions of the atomic hypothesis, later confirmed experimentally, cinching the case that matter is made of atoms. In March of that year he argued that light, long described as a wave, is actually composed of particles, called photons, an observation that launched quantum mechanics. While working eight hours days, six days a week at the Swiss patent office in Bern, he wrote four papers in his spare time that changed the course of physics. Einstein has come to symbolize the purity and power of intellectual exploration.Įinstein shot to fame within the scientific community in 1905, a year christened as his annus mirabilis. We see the good-natured, wild-haired scientific genius whose iconic portraits-riding a bike, sticking out his tongue, staring at us with those penetrating eyes-are emblazoned in our collective cultural memory. The reason is that the name “Einstein” conjures an image of a warm-hearted, avuncular sage of an earlier era. And, he confessed, he wasn't sure about the universe. Albert Einstein once said that there are only two things that might be infinite: the universe and human stupidity.
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