How long is 100 years? It’s all relative

2005 marks the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s miraculous year.

By: David Campbell
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in an occasional series of articles The Packet will run throughout 2005, the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s "annus mirabilis" — his miraculous year — during which the physicist published five of his most influential papers, including a paper introducing his renowned theory of relativity.
   A century ago this year, Albert Einstein achieved the miraculous. In a single year, he published five influential scientific papers, any one of which would have made a physicist’s career.
   One of them won a Nobel Prize.
   And two others, while they did not garner any prizes in physics, achieved something nevertheless astonishing:
   They turned science on its head and refashioned the cosmos as we know it.
   This year is the centennial of Einstein’s "annus mirabilis" — 1905, his miraculous year. In an awesome burst of creative energy, a then virtually unknown 26-year-old Swiss patent clerk revolutionized physics in a single stroke.
   Not all of Einstein’s contemporaries realized it at first. Sixteen years later, in 1921, the Nobel committee awarded him the prize in physics for his paper on the photoelectric effect — not relativity.
   And yet by then, Einstein had refined his thinking on relativity, expanding his special theory of the 1905 papers to a general theory that took into account the effects of gravity. One of general relativity’s predictions — that gravity bends light — had been confirmed with scientific observations of a solar eclipse in 1919. Einstein was made a global celebrity, and the foundations of contemporary physics — Sir Isaac Newton’s absolute mechanics of bodies in motion — were upended overnight.
   The two most famous of Einstein’s 1905 papers are the ones introducing special relativity: "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" and "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?"
   In the first, Einstein showed that absolute time did not exist, but should be replaced with a different absolute, the speed of light. In the second, he showed that mass equals energy, giving rise to the now well-known formula E = MC¯.
   In his paper "On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light," the one that earned him his Nobel Prize, Einstein’s ideas about light particles helped usher in the era of quantum physics. The fourth paper examined the Brownian motion of these particles, and the fifth was Einstein’s doctoral dissertation on the size of molecules.
   "In that year, he produced publications in three or four areas which were of quite epoch-making significance," said Dr. Peter Goddard, director of the Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein was a faculty member at the institute, which this year is marking the 75th anniversary of its founding, from 1933 to 1955, and played a key role in its development.
   "What was really remarkable about Einstein was this burst of activity," Dr. Goddard continued. "It brought together various things that were being done at the time."
   But while Einstein’s special theory of relativity may have served as the most lucid synthesis of ideas already taking shape around him, the IAS director said, his generalized theory was something quite unique, and definitely revolutionary.
   "This was a path he took by himself," Dr. Goddard said. "Of all the developments of history, certainly of modern science, somebody had a vision and carried it through, and leapt ahead of everybody else.
   "He had to learn a whole lot of new mathematics," he said. "He showed the math you needed to describe the world was much different than what had been thought before."
   Alice Calaprice, editor of "The New Quotable Einstein" and co-author of a new Einstein biography, both due out this spring, said the physicist’s genius lay in his unique way of looking at the world — that is, like a child.
   "He claimed he never lost his curiosity," said Ms. Calaprice, a Valley Road resident. "Where most adults outgrew childlike curiosity, he was still asking fundamental questions only children would ask.
   "He continued to be curious about things later than most people," she continued. "Scientists have said that because he had a job at the patent office in Bern, rather than in academia with academic obligations, he had more time to think about relativity and other topics."
   Professor Scott Tremaine, chairman of Princeton University’s Department of Astrophysical Sciences, said Einstein’s 1905 papers were remarkably clear-headed in their thinking — so much so, the astrophysicist said, that he remembers being drawn in by their logic even as a young student just starting out.
   "Really, a lot of good physics papers are hard to understand," Prof. Tremaine said. "Einstein’s are so clear. The logic is just so simple that after it’s been explained, you can’t imagine why everybody missed it — that’s the hallmark of something really great.
   "Einstein’s genius really was in stepping back and questioning the most basic assumptions of hundreds of years," he continued. "He recognized that if you twisted and changed things a little bit, it made sense."
   Asked to comment on Einstein’s achievements, physicist John Stachel, editor of "Ein- stein’s Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics," which is due out in paperback in May, pointed to a piece he wrote for the Jan. 20 issue of Nature magazine.
   "What is Einstein’s greatest achievement?" he posits in the article. "It is probably too early to say, but let me give my guess: the formulation of the first background-independent physical theory."
   If you want to find out what Professor Stachel means by this — and provided you’ve boned up on your "non-dynamical fields" and "chrono-geometry" — you’d do well to pick up the upcoming issue of Nature.
See the NEWS section for a listing of events this year honoring Einstein.