Five reasons we should celebrate Albert Einstein

From his radical thinking to his radical politics, his disavowal of celebrity to his wild hairstyle, the great physicist's significance endures, argues his biographer

Einstein was, first and foremost, a scientist. In 1905 and again in 1916, he radically revised our understanding of the universe. He was a pictorial thinker who came up with a new, intuitive sense of what reality looked like. Physics at the start of the 20th century was a rather settled endeavour, not seemingly in need of radical revision. We thought light was a wave and that duration, length and mass were objective facts of the world. We thought that space was a flat, Euclidean entity, unaffected by the distribution of matter and energy within it. Einstein, a mere patent clerk when he first began suggesting differently, showed us that light must be thought of as a particle when it is emitted or absorbed, that matter is composed of atoms, that space is malleable, undulating with the distribution of the stuff within it, that how long or massive an object is or the time order of closely occurring events is not a fact of the world, but merely a fact of our point of view. He showed that these perspectival truths were well-behaved when they were placed in a four-dimensional conceptual framework. Seeing may be believing, but what we should believe about the universe, Einstein demonstrated, requires seeing it from a reference frame beyond that of the human senses.

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