Name: 【TED-Ed】Einstein's miracle year - Larry Lagerstrom
Uploaded: 2015-01-11T13:44:31.000Z
Duration: 5 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

the soon-to-be 26-year-old Albert Einstein faced life as a failed academic.

Most physicists of the time would have scoffed at the idea

that this minor civil servant could have much to contribute to science.

but four extraordinary papers, each on a different topic,

that were destined to radically transform our understanding of the universe.

The myth that Einstein  had failed math is just that.

He had mastered calculus on his own by the age of 15

and done well at both  his Munich secondary school

where he studied for a math and physics teaching diploma.

But skipping classes to spend  more time in the lab

and neglecting to show proper deference to his professors

Passed over even  for a lab assistant position,

he had to settle for a job at the Swiss patent office,

obtained with the help  of a friend's father.

Working six days a week as a patent clerk,

Einstein still managed to make  some time for physics,

discussing the latest work with a few close friends,

when in March 1905 he submitted  a paper with a shocking hypothesis.

Despite decades of evidence  that light was a wave,

Einstein proposed that it could, in fact, be a particle,

showing that mysterious phenomena, such as the photoelectric effect,

but Einstein was simply  twenty years ahead of his time.

Wave-particle duality was slated to become a cornerstone of the quantum revolution.

Two months later in May, Einstein submitted a second paper,

this time tackling the centuries old question of whether atoms actually exist.

Though certain theories were built on the idea of invisible atoms,

some prominent scientists still believed them to be a useful fiction,

showing that the behavior  of small particles

randomly moving around in a liquid, known as Brownian motion,

by the collisions of millions of invisible atoms.

Experiments soon confirmed  Einstein's model,

Einstein had been troubled  by an inconsistency

between two fundamental  principles of physics.

The well established  principle of relativity,

stated that absolute motion could not be defined.

Yet electromagnetic theory, also well established,

The discrepancy,  and his inability to resolve it,

left Einstein in what he described as a state of psychic tension.

after he had mulled over the puzzle with his friend Michele Besso,

Einstein realized  that the contradiction could be resolved

if it was the speed of light  that remained constant,

while both time and space were relative to the observer.

It took Einstein only a few weeks to work out the details

and formulate what came to be known as special relativity.

The theory not only shattered our previous understanding of reality

but would also pave the way  for technologies,

a fourth paper arrived as a "by the way"  follow-up to the special relativity paper.

Einstein had thought a little bit more about his theory,

and realized it also implied  that mass and energy,

one apparently solid  and the other supposedly ethereal,

And their relationship could be expressed in what was to become the most famous

Einstein would not become a world famous icon for nearly another fifteen years.

It was only after his later general theory of relativity was confirmed in 1919

by measuring the bending of starlight during a solar eclipse

that the press would turn him into a celebrity.

But even if he had disappeared back into the patent office

and accomplished nothing else after 1905,

would have remained the gold standard  of startling unexpected genius.