The Hindu Business Line : Year of Physics

THE UN has declared 2005 as the World Year of Physics in commemoration of the first path-breaking paper published by Albert Einstein in 1905 on the electro-dynamics of moving bodies.

He was barely 26, with not a very distinguished background as a poor student and a patent office clerk. He nevertheless created a sensation in the scientific community by toppling many earlier assumptions of physics.

More was to come, culminating in the General Theory of Relativity, standing physics on its head, with its revolutionary concepts of space-time continuum, bending of light and the nature of light as both a wave and being made up of particles. It is no exaggeration to say that the world today is ruled by Einsteinian, not Newtonian, physics.

Still, for him "All our science, measured against reality, is primitive, child-like", making him eager to know how God created this world and what His thoughts were at that moment.

His famous equation e=mc2 which was the basis of the atom bomb became a household word. Even so, till today, even renowned physicists struggle to explain the theory in simple terms intelligible to the average person.

Of course, Einstein often palmed it off with the jocular example of how for two kissing lovers hours seemed seconds when they were together, and how a second seemed eternity when one placed one's hand on a hot stove.

Einstein was not only a genius in his own field, but also a person of intense commitment to the cause of social justice so much so that many slyly accused him of communist sympathies.

At the height of indiscriminate character assassinations carried on by Senator Joseph McCarthy through the Senate Un-American Activities Committee, he boldly declared (all honour to him) in a published statement: "I can only see the revolutionary way of non-co-operation, in Gandhi's sense. Every intellectual who is called before one of the committees ought to refuse to testify, that is, he must be prepared for jail and economic ruin, in short, for the sacrifice of his personal welfare in the interest of the cultural welfare of his country.... If enough people are ready to take this grave step they will be successful. If not, then the intellectuals of this country deserve nothing better than the slavery which is intended for them."

When comes such another?

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