Einstein: Introduction
It did not take long for Planck's new quanta approach to make its presence felt. In 1905, Albert Einstein published four papers which changed the face of world physics.
These major milestones are encapsulated in summary form below:
Einstein’s annus mirabilis – a convenient summary [2] [3]
- In March of that year, he published his quantum theory of light for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1921. Drawing on Planck’s ideas, he argued that light behaved the way it did because it was composed of tiny particles called photons, and thereafter the view that the universe was composed of small discrete chunks of matter and energy went on to become the basis of quantum mechanics.
- In April and May, he published two papers providing empirical support for the existence of the atom, which was still the subject of ongoing debate in the physics community at the time[1].
- In June he published his theory of special relativity,
- and in September, in a paper entitled Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content? and submitted for publication the day after his paper on special relativity was published, in perhaps the crowning achievement of all, he published his famous E=mc2 equation showing that energy and mass, both variables, are different forms of the same thing, E representing energy, m an object’s mass and c a constant: the speed of light.
These major milestones are encapsulated in summary form below:
Einstein’s annus mirabilis – a convenient summary [2] [3]
[1] One of these was on Brownian motion; the other concerned the measurement of sugar molecules, the subject of his Ph D thesis, published in April 1905 and referred to below.
[2] Source, with some modification:
http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Annus_Mirabilis_papers
[3] Statistical mechanics: using probability theory to study the thermodynamic behaviour of systems composed of a large number of particles and extrapolating from the microscopic properties of individual atoms and molecules to the macroscopic bulk properties of the system as a whole.