University Physics with Modern Physics

We were about to enter the quantum age, and the first person to push on the door was the so-far unfortunate Max Planck. In 1900, now a theoretical physicist at the University of Berlin and at the somewhat advanced age of forty-two, Planck unveiled a new БЂњquantum theory,БЂ«which posited that energy is not a continuous thing like flowing water but comes in individualized packets, which he called quanta. This was a novel concept, and a good one. In the short term it would help to provide a solution to the puzzle of the Michelson-Morley experiments in that it demonstrated that light neednБЂ™t be a wave after all. In the longer term it would lay the foundation for the whole of modern physics. It was, at all events, the first clue that the world was about to change. But the landmark event-the dawn of a new age-came in 1905, when there appeared in the German physics journal Annalen der Physik a series of papers by a young Swiss bureaucrat who had no university affiliation, no access to a laboratory, and the regular use of no library greater than that of the national patent office in Bern, where he was employed as a technical examiner third class. (An application to be promoted to technical examiner second class had recently been rejected.) His name was Albert Einstein, and in that one eventful year he submitted to Annalen der Physik five papers, of which three, according to C. P ...»