Einstein Centennial

摘要

Having unsuccessfully sought a teaching position after graduation from Zurich Polytechnic Institute, Albert Einstein was a clerk in the Bern patent office in 1905. During this year, he published five papers, including one which proposed that a quantity of matter annihilated would yield a tremendous amount of energy. He expressed this as E = mc~2, which author David Bodanis claims is the most famous equation ever but a most difficult one to comprehend. In E=mc~2: A. Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation, he analyzes each factor, and then discusses prominent applications of this conversion of mass to energy.