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

Recognizing ‘something profound’
“Would Einstein be able, in 2005, to become recognized as he did in 1905?” Rigden asked. “That’s a really open question.

“It’s not clear to me that he would be able to do that. If intelligent people really gave his manuscripts a careful read, they would have recognized something profound. He might be published, but boy, it’s not clear. He was fortunate to have lived when he did.”

Robert Schulmann, who co-edited Einstein’s collected papers and is former director of the Einstein Papers Project, is more hopeful that his voice would have broken through.

Slide show Life of genius View a photographic timeline spanning the life of Albert Einstein. more photos

The journal that published his 1905 papers, Annalen der Physik, was the leading physics journal of the day. Among the editors who reviewed his submissions were Nobel laureate Wilhelm Roentgen, who discovered X-rays, and Max Planck, another Nobel winner, who came as close to matching Einstein in sheer brain power as anyone else ever did. If such esteemed editors found merit in the theories of the government clerk then, Schulmann said, it is likely that they would do so today.

But even Schulmann said it would be an iffy proposition. Much of Einstein’s work was multidisciplinary and abstract, while physics today is focused and empirical.

“The possibility of coming out of almost nowhere, for a number of reasons, wouldn’t work today because of the highly philosophical character of his work. The questions he asked himself ... deal with space and time, which are philosophical concepts,” said Schulmann, who is at work on a biography of Einstein.

Janssen said there was “something special about the age that Einstein was working where he was, in a way, the right man at the right time at the right place. Between 1900 and 1925, you saw this tremendous overhaul of physics, and it is hard to imagine that today we’re going to see an overhaul on that scale.”

You can’t take a step without smacking into Einstein
The paper on the photoelectric effect was just one of several that Einstein issued in 1905 that fundamentally altered how physicists look at the world. From the other papers came an almost equally wide range of modern applications:

• Compact disc and DVD players use lasers, which Einstein first theorized in 1917 in advancing his work on the photoelectric and photovoltaic effects. “We have lasers in every supermarket checkout lane,” Rigden said.
• Medical revolutions like the PET scan rest on positrons, described by science journalist Robert Matthews as “antimatter electrons,” whose existence was implied by special relativity and quantum theory. (Science fiction revolutions, too: Antimatter, in reaction with matter, is what makes the Enterprise jump into warp speed in the “Star Trek” universe.)
• Carbon dating. We can take a stab at measuring how old fossils are thanks to Einstein (E=mc² shows that mass and energy are interconnected; by measuring the degradation of nuclei in atoms of organic materials, the theory goes, we can measure how long they’ve been degrading).
• And all those everyday consumer products, which owe their existence, in no small part, to manufacturing methods that wouldn’t work without Einstein’s enunciation of the atomic theory of matter. In essence, he proved that atoms exist.

Before Einstein’s paper of May 1905, “many reputable scientists didn’t believe in atoms,” Rigden said. “May 1905 put the last nail in the coffin [of atomism naysayers]. No longer could the reality of atoms be denied.

“The nucleus wasn’t even discovered until 1909, so Einstein’s prescience was off the charts.”

Most important, perhaps, was Einstein’s restoration of the belief in the power of reason and intellect. He gave science back its confidence.

“Before the First World War, there was still a lot of faith in rationality. The First World War smashed this faith in reason pretty irreparably,” Schulmann said. “And here you had a man detached from all of the events of the First World War, basically, who with a pencil and paper was able to explain the logical and rational way that the world and the universe worked.”

Rigden suggested that “the first contribution that Einstein made that dramatically affects our lives was that he did it with the power of his mind.”

Einstein “wasn’t blessed with experimental data — it was mostly abstract ideas,” he said. “That is a distinctive aspect of homo sapiens: We have a big brain. ...

“He is a standard because of what he did. And how he did it.”

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