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Recommended for: Grades 6-12

Resource: Einstein: How Smart Was He?

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He established that the speed of light is constant, but that time and space are not as simple as had been thought. He found that energy and mass were intimately related, and that gravity resulted from the effect of energy and matter on space and time. He even conceptualized black holes -- invisible stellar objects -- long before they were proven to exist. In this essay from the NOVA Web site, learn why Albert Einstein tops many people's lists of the greatest-ever scientific geniuses.

Teachers' Domain, Einstein: How Smart Was He?, published January 29, 2004, retrieved on ,
http://www.teachersdomain.org/resource/phy03.sci.phys.fund.howsmart/

The author of this essay argues that between 1905 and 1925, Albert Einstein "transformed humankind's understanding of nature on every scale, from the smallest to that of the cosmos as a whole." Who could argue with this? Historians have taken to calling 1905 alone, the first year in this span of remarkable productivity, the "annus mirabilis". That's Latin for the miracle year. This was when Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity, demonstrating that space and time are not absolute as Isaac Newton had said centuries before. Though employed full-time as a patent clerk, Einstein also proposed the idea that light exists not as waves, but as tiny energy packets called photons, and that these photons are capable of traveling in either particle or wave form. Within the same theory that linked space and time, he established that energy and matter are linked, which led to perhaps the most famous equation of all: E=mc².