WHAT can you say about Einstein that hasn鈥檛 already been said? Well, not much, but that didn鈥檛 stop nearly every newspaper, magazine and journal from devoting pages and pages to the grand old man of physics. They turned 2005 from a year when nothing dramatic happened in physics into a year when physics was the stuff of headline news and cover stories.
1905. Now that was a landmark year. Einstein published five seminal papers and forever changed our notions of space and time. Not surprisingly, the centenary celebrations knew no bounds: Einstein lookalikes donned grey frizzy wigs in New York; ballet dancers pirouetted as particles in London; and Einstein鈥檚 theories rocked the stage at the UK鈥檚 Glastonbury music festival, as students showed the crowd the physics behind the music.
It wasn鈥檛 all sweet adulation for Einstein, though. Towards the end of the year, he lost out to Isaac Newton in a popularity contest. Einstein may have rewritten Newton鈥檚 laws of physics, but the cantankerous Brit was named by London鈥檚 Royal Society as the most influential scientist of all time. Was this a sign of Einstein fatigue during a year of hype?
Advertisement
If so, Einstein came back with a vengeance. In November, astronomers confirmed that the dark energy that seems to be pulling our universe apart is awfully like Einstein鈥檚 鈥渃osmological constant鈥�. Never mind that the constant was a fudge that Einstein introduced into his equations of general relativity to show that the universe was static. He was to call it the 鈥渂iggest blunder鈥� of his life. Fifty years after his death, and 100 years after some of his greatest work, it seems that even when Einstein was wrong, he was right.
And here are all of 快猫短视频鈥檚 roundup stories for 2005.
