Will Hines |
nyc improviser, actor, director and perhaps oddly, computer programmer. |
You will let me sit down and summarize Albert Einstein’s four “Annus Mirabilis Papers.” Annus Mirabilis means “miracle year” and in regards to Einstein it refers to 1905, when he was an unknown 26 year old physicists and published these papers:
(listing dates published)
June 1905 - The Photoelectric Effect. That light is emitted in discrete units called “quanta”, not as an unbroken beam.
July 1905 - Brownian motion. That molecules in all matter including solids are roaming around in the manner of dust particles in a sunbeam, so that you can observe them with a microscope thus heavily implying that atoms are real things.
September 1905 - Special Relativity. That the speed of light is both absolute and relative. That time runs at different rates in different places.
November 1905 - E=mc2. That matter and energy can be transformed into one another.
The third one is my favorite, but that he did them all in one year is ridiculous. It is like, and I say this without irony, when Elton John wrote his first 10 or so songs within 2 years, or Michael Jordan went apeshit on the NBA for 3 years in the middle of the 90s (you pick whatever 3 you want), or some writer that you can think of wrote a bunch of amazing shit in a short time like it was no big deal!
