In 1905, a series of papers appeared in the German physics journal, Annalen der Physik written by a young bureaucrat named Albert Einstein. Bizarrely, Einstein was affiliated to no university, had no access to a laboratory and was limited to using the library of the National Patent Office in Bern, where he was employed as a technical assistant, his responsibility being to evaluate patent applications for electromagnetic devices. These papers contributed substantially to the foundation of modern physics, changing the way that time, space and matter were viewed. One examined the photoelectric effect by means of Planck's new quantum theory, one focussed on the behaviour of small particles in suspension (Brownian motion) and one outlined a Special Theory of Relativity. The first explained the nature of light and won Einstein the Nobel Prize, the second definitively proved the existence of atoms and the third made sure nothing would ever be the same again. And what a curious piece of work it was - it contained almost no mathematics, cited no influences or precedents and provided no footnotes or citations. Einstein had developed his theory by just thinking, just thinking it out himself - astonishing. It's famous equation - E = mc squared, stated that energy and mass had an equivalence (hitherto thought of as distinct concepts), that they are two forms of the same thing: energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen. C squared (the speed of light times itself) is a massive number, this suggests that tiny amounts of matter could be converted into huge amounts of energy.
And hence it suggests that a huge amount of energy is bound up in every material thing. The paper also explained how radiation worked - how a lump of uranium could throw out constant streams of high-level energy without melting away - it converts mass to energy extremely efficiently. It explained how stars could twinkle for billions of years before burning out. It also showed that the speed of light was constant and supreme and that nothing could overtake it. And so, Einstein revealed the mysteries of the universe but the world was not ready yet and the papers received scant attention. But old Al's brain kept twirling, he got to thinking about gravity, the one thing missing from the Special Theory of Relativity was gravity, his thinking led to the publication of a paper entitled 'Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity'. It stated that space and time are not absolute, but relative to both the observer and to the thing being observed., and the faster one moves the more pronounced these effects become. One of the most boggling concepts in the General Theory of Relativity is the ideas that time is part of space. Our instinct is to consider time to be absolute and unalterable but Einstein stated that time is variable and ever-changing. He also suggested that the universe must be either expanding or contracting. Intriguingly, as the yeas passed, Einstein gained world-wide fame not as a physicist but rather as a spiritual leader, a symbol of the human spirit achieving its highest aspirations.