From today’s New York Times:
“With his discovery of special relativity, Einstein upended the familiar, thousands-year-old conception of space and time. To be sure, even a century later, not everyone has fully embraced Einstein’s discovery. Nevertheless, say ‘Einstein’ and most everyone thinks ‘relativity.’
What is less widely appreciated, however, is that physicists call 1905 Einstein’s ‘miracle year’ not because of the discovery of relativity alone, but because in that year Einstein achieved the unimaginable, writing four papers that each resulted in deep and formative changes to our understanding of the universe. One of these papers – not on relativity – garnered him the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics. It also began a transformation in physics that Einstein found so disquieting that he spent the last 30 years of his life in a determined effort to repudiate it.”
Here is the accompanying slide show.