Why is Einstein the Standard of Greatness?
John S. Rigden
Washington University in St. Louis
Abstract
Albert Einstein occupies a unique place in the modern mind because he
was a physicist and because physics has a special mystique. Einstein is
certainly the standard of intelligence and, even more, he is the
standard of greatness. The intellectual outpouring that Einstein
exhibited in 1905 with five ground-breaking papers in a short seven
months is unequaled in the history of science. He challenged 100 years
of confirmed wisdom with his March quantum theory of light (the only
1905 paper Einstein regarded as revolutionary); he established molecular
dimensions, verified the statistical nature of thermodynamics,
reconstructed space and time, and showed that energy and mass were the
same thing (E = mc2). All this he did by means of pure reason and by so
doing, Einstein touched the minds and emotions of Homo sapiens in a very
special way.