I am Albert Einstein at the end of 1905, what is known as the miracle year in science, the “annus mirabilis” 

Though the scientific establishment doesn’t yet know my name, I have produced four papers that will fundamentally alter our understanding of reality for more than a century, resulting in a period unequaled in all of science. 

I am Albert Einstein at the end of 1905, what is known as the miracle year in science, the “annus mirabilis.”  Though the scientific establishment doesn’t yet know my name, much less the broader cultural world, and I have been reduced to working at patent office in Bern, Switzerland rather than serving as a professor or finding any job in my field, I have produced four papers that will fundamentally alter our understanding of reality for more than a century, resulting in a period unequaled in all of science.  It is no exaggeration to say that these papers ushered in the modern era, covering everything from the basic building blocks of matter to the behavior of light to the nature of time and space itself.  First, on June 9, 1905, the Annalen der Physik published “Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt,” “On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light,” which proposed that light should be treated like a particle in some cases, explaining a phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect.  Three years earlier, Philipp Lenard had observed a disconnect between the intensity of light and the emitted energy of electrons when a high-powered arc light was shined on certain gases, ionizing them, seemingly in violation of James Clerk Maxwell’s wave theory, which held that the ratio should be proportional.  I solved this problem with a simple, yet groundbreaking proposal, the sort of thinking that would become a hallmark of my greatest work:  The energy was not tied to the intensity. Instead, it was proportional to the frequency of the light times an unknown constant, leading to the idea, first proposed by Max Plank in 1900, that light comes in discrete packets.  When these packets, now known as photons, pass a certain frequency, they contain the energy required to dislodge an electron, explaining the ionization effect observed in the gas.  It would take until 1914 before Robert A. Millikan was able to successfully calculate the constant, dubbed Plank’s constant, even as he still considered the very idea that light came in photons “quite unthinkable.”  I was subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921, while Millikan’s own prize followed in 1923, but before the ink was even dry as they say, I was already hard at work on my next breakthrough, “Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen,” “On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat,” which explained another long standing problem in physics, what is know as Brownian motion, essentially the subtle vibration of small particles suspended in a solution leading directly to the discovery of atoms.

Incredibly, this mystery began during the Roman empire, when in 60 BC the philosopher-poet Lucretius opined “On the Nature of Things,” “Observe what happens when sunbeams are admitted into a building and shed light on its shadowy places. You will see a multitude of tiny particles mingling in a multitude of ways…their dancing is an actual indication of underlying movements of matter that are hidden from our sight… It originates with the atoms which move of themselves [what we would call spontaneously]. Then those small compound bodies that are least removed from the impetus of the atoms are set in motion by the impact of their invisible blows and in turn cannon against slightly larger bodies. So the movement mounts up from the atoms and gradually emerges to the level of our senses so that those bodies are in motion that we see in sunbeams, moved by blows that remain invisible.”  While Lucretius was actually describing the motion of air currents, not individual atoms, he had stumbled on a universal truth that would take more than two millennia to fully realize because it wasn’t until the invention of the microscope that humanity was able to peer into the inner workings of matter.  Jan Igenhousz was the first to notice what he described as an irregular motion of coal dust particles floating in alcohol in 1785, what is considered the earliest true identification of Brownian motion, but the term was officially coined in 1827.  Then, the Scottish botanist Robert Brown observed that the pollen of the Clarkia pulcehella plant vibrates when suspended in water,  moving randomly in all directions even when no external energy was applied.  Instead, the tiny particles appeared to move entirely on their own, contrary to the physics of the day, but in line with what Lucretius had proposed almost two thousand years earlier.  Updating his idea for the early 20th century, I proposed that the water molecules themselves were responsible for this vibration, bombarding the pollen with 10 raised to the 14th power collisions per second, every second, and provided a ratio that predicts the amount of vibration based on the temperature of the water, which reflected the amount of underlying motion in the molecules.   This was achieved in two parts.  First, I defined a measure of the displacement of each particle, known as a “diffusion coefficient” which directly relates to three dimensional space.  Then, I mapped the diffusion coefficient to measurable and known physical quantities, allowing scientists to calculate the size of the atom in question and their molecular weight.  By doing so, I proved the existence of atoms for the first time and set the stage for a more careful study of the behavior of subatomic particles that came to be known as quantum theory.  Ironically, I ultimately rejected the conclusions of this entire branch of science that I helped to create, declaring that God doesn’t play dice, and spending my waning years fruitlessly searching for a replacement.

During this period, younger scientists tended to view me as an old crank, unable to keep pace with what the next generation had dreamed of, but that was decades in the future.  Back in 1905, I still wasn’t done yet, publishing two more papers on the topic I would become most known for, the theory of relativity.  Once again, I took an old problem and completely reimagined how to develop a solution.  In this case, Galileo Galilei was the first to note that it can be difficult to tell whether we are moving or standing still.  As he imagined it, if you are locked in the hold of a ship, unable to see the outside world, and sailing on smooth seas, objects in the interior behave exactly as they would on solid ground.  If you drop a ball, you will perceive it falling straight down before bouncing back up, but someone outside the ship would notice that the ball had moved in the direction the ship was traveling as well.  This principle came to be known as Galilean invariance, though it wasn’t thought of much after Isaac Newton proposed theories that required a universal construct for both space and time.  Since then, the search to find this universal background was on, leading to the idea that the universe was pervaded by a mysterious aether upon which all events occurred, a fluid of sorts through which we were all sailing on invisible seas.  When Maxwell developed the theory that light propagated via electromagnetic waves in 1865, it was presumed that these waves traveled through the aether similar to how sound waves propagated through the air or ocean waves the water.  Enterprising scientists set out to measure slight differences in the speed of light based on its motion in the presumed aether, culminating in the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887.  At great expense, Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley, at what is now Case Western University, assembled a contraption precise enough to measure tiny changes in the speed of light based on how the Earth was believed to travel through the aether.  The contraption boasted arms 11 meters long for light to reflect back and forth, built on top of a  large black of sandstone, floated in a trough of mercury, and sealed in the basement of a stone dormitory to reduce if not entirely eliminate the effects of heat and vibration.  Because the device could rotate, Michelson and Morley believed they would be able to measure slight differences in the speed of light based on whether it was traveling perpendicular to the motion of the Earth or parallel to it, enabling them to finally detect the presence of the near mythical aether, but in what came to be considered the most famous failed experiment in history, they found that light traveled at the same speed whatever direction the device was pointed.

This left two options, either the device was insufficient to measure the difference in velocity or the aether didn’t exist.  I chose the latter and instead proposed that the speed of light, as calculated by Maxwell’s famous equations, was the same for all observers, no matter how fast or in what direction you were traveling.  I based this idea on the earlier Galilean notion of relativity and the laws of physics themselves being the same in all frames of reference moving at a constant speed, meaning that if you are sealed in a perfectly vessel that is traveling smoothly – I updated Galileo’s ship to a more modern train – there is no experiment you can perform to determine whether or not you are moving.  The combination of the two ideas dispensed with Newton’s proposition that there is absolute time or motion, replacing it with the idea that everything can only be measured relative to everything else.  Because all of these measurements are based on observation, and observing things requires the time it takes for light to travel, and because light always goes at the same speed regardless of how fast one is traveling, my special theory of relativity concluded that it is impossible to say with certainty whether two events occur simultaneously.  As I put it in one of my famous thought experiments, if lightning were to strike the front and back of a train, a person on a train moving at a high speed relative to a person standing on a platform would perceive the events as happening at different times.  If the person on the platform perceives the lightning strikes as simultaneous, but the person on the train is traveling towards the source of one of the strikes and away from the other, they would perceive the first strike as happening slightly earlier than the second.  In other words, each observer will record their own happenings based on their velocity relative to the object being measured and the speed of light, leading to the idea that space and time are one and the same, and both vary based on one’s frame of reference.  Ironically, I wasn’t the first person to work this out.  The equations that describe these changes in time and distance do not bear my name.  Instead, they are known as the Lorentz transformations after the mathematician Hendrik Lorentz, who purely for thought experiment purposes calculated what would happen if two frames of reference were moving relative to each other.  He published these findings in 1904, but did not understand the physical implications and the world needed to wait another year for me to combine the two.

In a further irony, my final publication in 1905 described the most famous equation in the history of the world, energy equals mass times a constant squared, where the constant is the speed of light, but it doesn’t bear my name either.  After I proposed the special theory of relativity, I realized there was another hidden implication that would change the world, perhaps more so than anything else I have ever done.  Previously, scientists believed that an object possessed energy based entirely on its motion.  If an object is moving, it acquires kinetic energy based on its mass and how fast it is traveling, but because space and time are connected under special relativity, a stationary object possesses energy based purely on its motion through time.  The most famous equation in the world calculates this connection, concluding that mass and energy are interchangeable, unlocking the idea that mass can be converted into energy and setting the stage for both nuclear weapons and nuclear power.  At this point, most scientists would likely have been satisfied, but as you have probably guessed, I’m not most scientists.  I’m Albert Einstein, the personification of the idea of science if ever there was one in a single person, and I found myself immediately dissatisfied with the idea that this version of relativity was special, that is, it only applied to objects moving at a constant speed.  This struck me as far too restrictive in a universe where most objects are constantly changing speed, either accelerating or decelerating, rather than standing still or continuing their idealized courses.  To resolve this problem, I would need to change the world yet again – but that story took another ten years and it wasn’t until 1915 that I published the General Theory of Relativity which treated gravity and acceleration as one and the same.  At the same time, the hallmark of my genius, that is my ability to think completely outside the box, free from the prejudices of other scientists, applied then as it did in 1905.  To uncover the photoelectric effect, I felt free to dispense with the notion that light must be a wave and let my theory go wherever the data led, surprising scientists for another decade.  To describe Brownian motion, I did much the same, assuming that if atoms existed and were responsible, their presence could be calculated based on this notion.  To dispense with universal time and space and to usher in the atomic age, I rejected the centuries old notion of a mysterious aether and returned instead to the work of Galileo.  Afterwards, I began my quest for a more generalized theory by recognizing that gravity and acceleration are one and the same by imagining what happens when you fall out of a building with another group of objects dropped at the same time.  If you have sufficiently long to fall and there’s no air pressure to interfere with the speed of smaller objects, you will perceive the objects moving at the same speed you are.  In fact, you would not know you were falling at all.

If there is one thing that made me a genius, it was this ability to question everything, one I kept throughout the remaining decades of my life, even after I was spurned and scorned by a scientific establishment that embraced the paradoxes of quantum mechanics without question, above and beyond anything else.  While I didn’t succeed in finding my unified theory, I remain a valuable lesson to this day:  By refusing to wonder how it’s possible for the subatomic world to function so radically differently than the world we observe every day, physics has been stuck at complete theoretical standstill for over forty years.  The two great theorems that define the world, my General Theory and quantum theory, which became known as the Standard Model of Particle Physics, remain irreconcilable and have yet to be succeeded by anything revolutionary.  Instead, the insistence that the tenets of quantum theory are inviolable however strange it may appear to conclude a cat is both dead and alive for example, have led modern physics down a near endless wormhole into the completely and totally absurd.  Today, it is no exaggeration to say that modern physics is more faith based than any religion, and increasingly describes a universe that simply doesn’t exist, but if they’d listened to me, Albert Einstein, even as an old codger…