Albert Einstein's Miraculous Year

Few names hold a as special a place in the mind of so many people as that of Albert Einstein. The crazy hair, bushy mustache and stooped walk of his elder days are plastered on college dorm walls above pithy quotes from the man. When we want to insult someone's intelligence, we say “he's no Einstein,” and when NOVA (a science show on PBS) wanted to complement the physicist Richard Feynman, they called him the greatest mind since Einstein.

Some of this attention borders on idol worship, but, on the other hand...it's fairly well deserved. 

In fact, during the single year of 1905, Einstein published four major papers and a small addendum to one of those four, all while working as a patent clerk. Those papers redefined the universe as we know it. It was, in fact, so clear to both Einstein and his first wife that those papers were remarkable, they when they divorced, she accepted a promise of the money he would someday win with his Nobel Prize as alimony.

In one of those papers, he calculated what would eventually be known as Avogadro's number (the number of particles in a mole of something) by measuring the viscosity (thickness) of various sugar solutions. In another he described, mathematically, the random motion of particles (called Brownian motion) and in the process, essentially proved the existence of atoms. In another, he presented his theory of Special Relativity, a completely new way of looking at motion that would eventually reinvent much of physics. It was, in fact, the measurement of light bending during a solar eclipse (as his theory predicted) that made him a star. He also introduced, in a brief letter to the journal that published the Special Relativity paper, the formula for which he is most well known, e = mc².

The fourth paper is the most relevant to chemistry students. In that paper Einstein explained the photoelectric effect.