Albert Einstein!

"A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new." - Albert Einstein

Happy birthday to the most influential and in my opinion one of the smartest men to ever have lived! Albert Einstein, 133 years since his date of birth today. 


I take it all of you have heard of him, yes?


But I take it all of you do not know what he actually did, no?


You will all of heard have E=mc^2 but apart from that many people do not know much of Albert's work. He didn't even win his Nobel Prize for his most known equation; E=mc^2 - it was a totally unrelated (kind of) subject. 


Einstein received his Nobel Prize for his discoveries regarding the photoelectric effect, and "his contributions to Theoretical Physics."


In this post I will highlight some of Einstein's key papers.


His main papers were his theories of General and Special Relativity, these revolutionised physics as we know it. Without these papers I do not think we would be where we are today with physics. 


Einstein published 4 main papers in 1905, they are called the Annus Mirabilis papers, this translates from Latin into extraordinary year. It as an extraordinary year indeed, 4 papers published in basically 4 month, on after another.


One on Brownian Motion, which was the evidence needed to prove the atom.


One on the Photoelectric Effect, which said that light 'traveled' in particles, and were called 'quanta'. This then lead to the uprising of quantum theory. (This was published before the Brownian Motion paper).


The next was on Special Relativity, which was about electricity - and Maxwells equations to do with it. it then goes on to talk about the speed of light. 


And finally the Matter-Energy Equivalence, which contains the amazing equation E=mc^2, this paper lead to Einstein hypothesising that gravity bends light etc.


Einstein has accomplished a lot in physics, he is the most successful physicist who has ever existed in my opinion, even 65 years (approx) after his death - we still know his name. He has left a physics legacy, which lead to quantum theory and another whole branch of physics. Take some time out of your day today to appreciate the work of Albert Einstein.


Thanks for reading, Ben.