Prof. Sushanta Duttagupta discusses the beauty of one of Albert Einstein?s historic papers in 1905

In 1905, sitting far away from the mainstream activity of science, Albert Einstein, then a patent office clerk working in Bern, Switzerland, singlehandedly brought about a revolution. During the spare time at the office, and also the time he could snatch for himself at home, he wrote three seminal papers that shook the world of science. One hundred years after that physics owes much of its present stature to those papers. To honour the quintessential grand old man of science and his papers, the United Nations has declared 2005 as World Year of Physics. On this occasion, the S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences (SNBNCBS) and Indian Physics Association (IPA) organised a day-long series of lectures at its premises in Salt Lake. Eminent speakers from various parts of India gathered there on January 1, special to the institute as it?s also the birthday of S.N. Bose.

The lectures dealt with the photoelectric effect (the capacity of light to knock off electrons from metal surfaces), Brownian motion (zig-zag movement of particles suspended in a liquid) and the special theory of relativity (which, among others, spawned E=mc2 ? the most famous equation in science).

Speaking on the Brownian motion, Dr Sushanta Duttagupta, director, SNBNCBS, said, ?Einstein wrote the paper on this in just six days.? According to him, Einstein calculated the average trajectory of a microscopic particle buffeted by random collisions with molecules of the fluid or gas. Einstein also predicted that motions of this kind could be observed through a microscope.

Speaking on the photoelectric effect, Dr H.S. Mani from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, said Einstein used physicist Max Planck?s quantum hypothesis to describe light, a visible electromagnetic radiation. ?Armed with the knowledge of quantum theory, which also describes light as a stream of minute energetic particles called photons, Einstein invented an equation that precisely calculates the minimum energy needed to knock out an electron out of the metal?s surface,? Mani said.

Dr C.V. Vishveshwara, from the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, Bangalore, discussed Einstein?s most famous paper of 1905 ? the one on the special theory of relativity. ?During childhood, a paradox haunted Einstein,? said Vishveshwara. ?He used to ask himself what a light beam would look like if you caught up with one. At the age of 16, he spotted the flaw in his argument. A light beam remains elusive no matter how hard you try to catch up with it.?

Special relativity did not resolve some of the deep mysteries of the cosmos. ?For that Einstein had to invent the general theory of relativity,? said Vishveshwara. ?That finally explained the precessions of the orbital motion of planets and the bending of starlight in the vicinity of a massive body such as the sun.? (Biplab Das)