The German-American physicist Albert Einstein, contributed more than any other scientist to the 20th- century. Born in the town of Ulm, Germany, March 14 and died in Princeton, N.J., April 18, 1955.
In the wake of World War I, Einstein's theories, especially his theory of relativity, seemed too many people to point to a pure quality of human thought, one far removed from the war and its aftermath. Seldom has a scientist received such public attention for having the ability for learning that he bad. In 1905, Einstein examined the phenomenon discovered by Max Planck, according to which electromagnetic energy seemed to be emitted from radiating objects in quantities that were ultimately discrete.
The energy of these emitted quantities—the so-called light-quanta—were directly proportional to the frequency of the radiation. This circumstance was perplexing because classical electromagnetic theory, based on Maxwell's equations and the laws of thermodynamics, had assumed that electromagnetic
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