smokerblog

Einstein's Century

(Following up on my recent post about the elegant universe:) The Economist explains the genius of Alblert Einstein, specifically, the genius displayed in a series of papers that he published in 1905.

He was not a particularly adroit experimenter or mathematician. His power lay in thinking more clearly about the physical consequences of experimental results than any of his contemporaries, or, indeed, than anyone since.

In separate papers, Einstein revolutionized the science of very large things with his special theory of relativity and launched the study of very small things with his pioneering work on quantum mechanics. For the rest of his life, Einstein worked to renconcile these two worlds, a puzzle that continues to vex scientists to this day.