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Contributions

 

 

"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." – Albert Einstein

 

In 1905 Einstein had three papers published.  Each of them would explore farther into the realms of various focuses of physics than anyone before him, and shine a fresh new light upon the solid foundations built by those who came before him.

The first paper examined some of the observations by Max Planck on the discrete energy quantities of EM waves produced by radiating objects.   This was a problem that needed addressed because standard electromagnetic theory, based on Maxwell’s equations and the laws of thermodynamics had assumed the presence of ether for the electromagnetic waves to propagate through.

Einstein used Planck’s quantum hypothesis to describe the visible light.  According to his viewpoint, light could be described as bundles of radiation.  He used this view to explain the photoelectric effect and later this work formed the basis for much of quantum mechanics.

 

The second paper proposed the now famous special theory of relativity.  He knew that according to Hendrik Antoon Lorentz’s theory of electrons, electrons would increase in mass as their velocity approached the speed of light.  Einstein expanded this to describe the behavior of any non accelerating particle or rigid body.  He based some of the work on the assumption that the laws of physics had to be the same no matter what the frame of reference.   He assumed that the speed of light remained constant in all frames of reference, abandoned ether, and recovered the phenomenon of time dilation.

 

The third paper was about statistical mechanics.  Einstein calculated the average trajectory of a microscopic particle effected by random collisions with molecules in a fluid or gas.  He observed that these findings could account for Brownian motion, the erratic movement of pollen in fluids.   This paper helped to give evidence for the existence of atom-sized molecules.   His same results were found independently by physicist Marian von Smoluchowski and later Jean Perrin.

 

In 1912, Einstein expanded his research into gravitation with Marcel Grossmann, converting his work into tensor calculus.  This greatly facilitated calculations in four-dimensional space-time.  Einstein called this new work the general theory of relativity.  After stumbling several times, he published the final form of the general theory in late 1915.   The gravitational equations took the same form in all equivalent frames of reference.  These equations gave the observed perihelion motion of Mercury.  In it’s original form, the general relativity has been verified frequently in the last 60 years, especially during solar-eclipse expeditions where the light-deflection predictions could be tested.

 

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."  -Albert Einstein