Today is Albert Einstein’s birthday. The great man was born on March 14, 1879.
If you ignore all of the many great contributions that Einstein made during his lifetime, and focus only on 1905, you will still come away dazed and astonished. In just that one year he published foundational scientific papers that completely transformed four different areas of science.
That year he published a landmark paper on the photoelectric effect, on brownian motion, on special relativity, and on the equivalency between matter and energy — popularly known as E = mc2.
Our modern views on space, time and matter were fundamentally altered by those four papers. For example, quantum theory arose from his paper on the photoelectric effect.
I doubt that such a streak of scientific brilliance will ever be duplicated. To me, there is something profoundly satisfying in knowing that it happened even once.
[A bit late, but leaving this here anyway…]
Looking through Einstein’s amazing accomplishments in 1905, it’s easy to assume he was a university professor, or a fellow at a prestigious research institute. Nope. He had a full time day job as a clerk at the Swiss patent office.
This means, all the amazing, Nobel-prize-winning, science changing work he did that year, was – technically – a hobby!
(The thought of Einstein working as a patent examiner always amused me. One of the requirements for issuing a patent is that it “not be obvious to one skilled in the art”. Wouldn’t everything be “obvious” to somebody like Einstein?)