Judging Einstein

摘要

This year we celebrate the cente-nary of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity. Indeed, 1905 was the year in which Einstein first gave notice of his astonishing abilities. He was but 26 and had just earned his doctorate, but that year he published four papers on separate topics, each of which marked a major advance in physics. The first of these, on the photo-electric effect (the subject of Roald Hoffmann's Marginalium in the previous issue), would bring him the Nobel Prize, but it was the third, on special relativity, that made him both famous and controversial. A decade after this flurry of papers, in 1915, he unveiled the theory of general relativity, shaking again the foundations of science.