Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Five papers that shook the world...
PhysicsWeb - Physics World - Five papers that shook the world:
Feature: January 2005
In 1905 an anonymous patent clerk in Bern rewrote the laws of physics in his spare time.
Matthew Chalmers
Most physicists would be happy to make one discovery that is important enough to be taught to future generations of physics students. Only a very small number manage this in their lifetime, and even fewer make two appearances in the textbooks. But Einstein was different. In little more than eight months in 1905 he completed five papers that would change the world for ever. Spanning three quite distinct topics - relativity, the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion - Einstein overturned our view of space and time, showed that it is insufficient to describe light purely as a wave, and laid the foundations for the discovery of atoms.
Genius at work
Perhaps even more remarkably, Einstein's 1905 papers were based neither on hard experimental evidence nor sophisticated mathematics. Instead, he presented elegant arguments and conclusions based on physical intuition. 'Einstein's work stands out not because it was difficult but because nobody at that time had been thinking the way he did,' says Gerard 't Hooft of the University of Utrecht, who shared the 1999 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work in quantum theory. 'Dirac, Fermi, Feynman and others also made multiple contributions to physics, but Einstein made the world realize, for the first time, that pure thought can change our understanding of nature.'
And just in case the enormity of Einstein's achievement is in any doubt, we have to remember that he did all of this in his 'spare time'."......
.............
Feature: January 2005
In 1905 an anonymous patent clerk in Bern rewrote the laws of physics in his spare time.
Matthew Chalmers
Most physicists would be happy to make one discovery that is important enough to be taught to future generations of physics students. Only a very small number manage this in their lifetime, and even fewer make two appearances in the textbooks. But Einstein was different. In little more than eight months in 1905 he completed five papers that would change the world for ever. Spanning three quite distinct topics - relativity, the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion - Einstein overturned our view of space and time, showed that it is insufficient to describe light purely as a wave, and laid the foundations for the discovery of atoms.
Genius at work
Perhaps even more remarkably, Einstein's 1905 papers were based neither on hard experimental evidence nor sophisticated mathematics. Instead, he presented elegant arguments and conclusions based on physical intuition. 'Einstein's work stands out not because it was difficult but because nobody at that time had been thinking the way he did,' says Gerard 't Hooft of the University of Utrecht, who shared the 1999 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work in quantum theory. 'Dirac, Fermi, Feynman and others also made multiple contributions to physics, but Einstein made the world realize, for the first time, that pure thought can change our understanding of nature.'
And just in case the enormity of Einstein's achievement is in any doubt, we have to remember that he did all of this in his 'spare time'."......
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