It’s Albert’s world. We just live in it.

6 a.m. Your satellite-enabled alarm clock goes off.

Blame Albert Einstein for rousting you out of bed. Your clock sounds precisely at 6 a.m. because it’s one of those fancy digital models that is synchronized with the government’s atomic clocks and calibrated every second through the Global Positioning Satellite array circling the Earth. If they could not correct for the effects of relativity, Einstein’s most famous discovery, GPS signals would accumulate so many errors that their data would be meaningless.

6:15 a.m. You nick yourself shaving and drip toothpaste on your shirt.

Blame Einstein for the mess. His creation of a formula to measure the size of molecules dissolved in liquids made it possible for scientists — among many other, more important, leaps — to create or improve thousands of consumer products, including better shaving creams and toothpastes.

6:30 a.m. You click on the television to check the weather and traffic. It’s raining, and the traffic cameras show that the cars are already backed up for miles on the interstate. It’s going to be a rough commute.

INTERACTIVE Putting Einstein to the test Why relativity is right ... and still relevant

Blame Einstein for your bad mood. His declaration of the photoelectric effect made possible the eventual invention of television cameras. And the remotes that control them. Also, it’s why digital cameras work.

You’ve been up for just a half-hour, and already your day is being controlled by Albert Einstein.

“How do you explain it?” asked John Rigden, a physicist at Washington University in St. Louis and author of “Einstein 1905.” After all, when Time magazine named Einstein its Person of the Century, it chose him over “all of the other people that made their indelible mark on the 20th century, all of the practical people — [Bill] Gates, you could go on and on.”

The flash of inspiration
Most likely, we think of Einstein first as the man who paved the way to development of the atomic bomb. This is not the right way to look at him.

Michel Janssen, a science and technology historian at the University of Minnesota, points out that Einstein had virtually nothing to do with developing the bomb, which grew out of the work of more up-to-date physicists in the 1930s. Einstein, in fact, was refused security clearance to have any role in the Manhattan Project, said Janssen, who was trained as a physicist and edited the volumes of Einstein’s collected papers on relativity.

Hulton Archive via Getty Images Albert Einstein in 1921, the year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for theories he enunciated in his great year of 1905.

However, many of Einstein’s other theories, which began pouring out in a burst of incandescent creativity 100 years ago, turned physics and our understanding of the natural world on their heads, giving scientists the tools to mold almost every observable aspect of life as we live it in 2005.

Einstein’s work gave us much more than eventual perfection of television, remote controls and digital cameras. His postulation of the photon (a “particle” of light) and the photoelectric effect — which was described in his first great paper of 1905 and won him the Nobel Prize in 1921 — gave us scores of everyday applications.

Einstein’s identifying of photons underlay the development of many of the advanced electronic inventions of the 20th century. It was the statement of the quantum effect, without which we would not have cellular telephones or smoke detectors or burglar alarms or those doors that automatically open at the supermarket or on the elevator.

Indeed, you can argue that the entire field of computers and semiconductors owes its existence to Einstein’s paper of March 17, 1905. That’s why it’s pointless to speculate about what he might have accomplished had he been born 75 or 80 years later and therefore been able to use computers. Without his having done the work he did when he did it, we might not have computers today, or at least not in the form we recognize.

Albert who?
Moreover, it’s possible that in today’s scientific world, Einstein would have trouble getting his ideas heard.

Science today is an institutionalized pursuit, regimented by a hierarchy of credentials. What are your degrees? What university or research institute are you affiliated with? How much peer-reviewed research have you published? How much grant money can you command?

While Einstein’s work at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, gave him wide opportunity to conduct sophisticated experiments on advanced submissions, he was, in his great year of 1905, still a 26-year-old government worker.

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