![]() In June 1905, Einstein published a paper answering his own teenage riddle: It would be impossible to catch up with a light beam. Not only did that research confirm that matter was composed of atoms of a particular size, but the statistical methods that Einstein used are still being applied to fields ranging from air-quality monitoring to stock market analysis. He followed up with yet another paper claiming that the mysterious jiggling of microscopic particles, known as Brownian motion, were actually caused by molecular collisions. In April 1905, Einstein finally completed his thesis, laying out how the properties of solutions could be used to determine the dimensions of molecules. The big idea has had practical consequences to this day, ranging from the rise of digital cameras to the rumblings of NASA's solar-powered Mars rovers. The first of his miracle-year papers, completed in March 1905, showed how the particle theory could explain phenomena that puzzled wave theorists. Rigden said Einstein's "big idea" was that light behaved not only like a wave, but like particles as well. "He asked much more penetrating questions." "The reason he was such a revolutionary was that he was much more aware than other people that there were still a lot of deep mysteries," Dyson says. Others, however, suspect that the effort might be fruitless. Some theorists say it could be done, if we could just add a few extra dimensions to the ones we perceive. I find that amazing."Īs if that weren't enough to chew on, physicists are still trying to do what Einstein could not: bridge the two grand pillars of modern physics, relativity and quantum mechanics, with a unifying "theory of everything" that could explain phenomena ranging from the Big Bang to the ultimate fate of the universe. "One hundred years have passed, and we're still 95 percent ignorant about the material world. "Now, today, if you put your hand on top of your desk, you know what your hand is contacting - but that type of matter makes up only about 5 percent of the universe," he says. Atoms were speculated about, and many people believed in them in 1905, but other people did not. ![]() "In other words, the nature of matter was unknown. "In 1905, if a person put their hand on top of their desk, they had no idea what their hand was contacting," Rigden says.
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