The year 2005 will be the centenary of Einstein's annus mirabilis, when he published the five papers that marked him as one of the greatest scientists of all time. Washington University professor Rigden (Hydrogen: The Essential Element
) sits readers down in front of his white board and explains what Einstein said in each of these papers, what was significant in them and how the scientific community reacted (not very well, in most cases—for a while). Einstein started off with a bang: in March he proposed that light was not a continuous wave, but was made up of particles. In April he finished what became his dissertation, on how to determine the size of molecules in a liquid (that may not sound very exciting, but this is one of Einstein's most cited papers). In May he wrote his paper on Brownian motion, and then in June came the summit of his achievements that year: the paper proposing his principles of relativity and the consistency of the speed of light (commonly known as the Special Theory of Relativity). Finally, almost as an afterthought, in September came the three-page paper that unleashed his now-famous equation, e=mc2, upon an unsuspecting world. Rigden writes with a rare felicity, free of jargon and with everyday metaphors that Einstein himself would no doubt have appreciated. 7 b&w illus, 5 line illus. (Jan.)
