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Einstein expanded several fields of physics. Special + general relativity Microscopic definition of Brownian motion Photoelectric effect Mass-energy equival

• eru 3y ago
  An interesting bit of trivia is that Einstein explicitly did not get his Nobel for relativity. That was still considered too controversial at the time. Another bit: at the time Einstein worked on Brownian motion the theory of atoms was still not entirely accepted by everyone. His worked helped settle the matter.
  • adrian_b 3y ago
    I would say that after a century of continuous successes, the theory of atoms was very well accepted by everyone. The matter of the existence of the atoms has become pretty much settled in 1865, when Johann Josef Loschmidt was the first who determined the size and mass of the atoms, and then his results were well used by others, like Maxwell and Stoney (who determined the electric charge of the atoms). Nevertheless, the improved theory due to Einstein has lead to more precise results about the atom properties.
• adrian_b 3y ago
  Actually I consider that by far the most valuable theoretical advance due to Einstein is the concept of stimulated emission, besides spontaneous emission and absorption, which has lead to the development of masers, lasers, atomic clocks and many other related devices, which have become an indispensable part of modern life. This is also one of few of his works, together with the general relativity theory that he published around the same time during WWI, where he introduced new mathematical relationships between physical quantities, instead of just giving new interpretations to relationships already found by others.