Technology Quarterly | A hundred years of bright ideas
How understanding light has led to a hundred years of bright ideas
The revolutionary theory of the nature of light which won Albert Einstein the 1921 Nobel prize for physics went on to remake the world. Oliver Morton surveys a century of innovation
ALBERT EINSTEIN won the 1921 Nobel prize for physics in 1922. The temporal anomaly embodied in that sentence was not, alas, one of the counterintuitive consequences of his theories of relativity, which distorted accustomed views of time and space. It was down to a stubborn Swedish ophthalmologist—and the fact that Einstein’s genius remade physics in more ways than one.
This article appeared in the Technology Quarterly section of the print edition under the headline “The liberation of light”
From the January 9th 2021 edition
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