Einstein's Special Relativity
Albert Einstein published the special theory of relativity, redefining space and time
September 26, 1905
The Year That Rewrote Physics
In 1905, Albert Einstein was a 26-year-old patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, with no academic position and no laboratory. That year he published four papers — any one of which would have made most scientists famous for life. The most revolutionary was his special theory of relativity, which proposed that the laws of physics are the same for everyone moving at constant speed, and that the speed of light is always the same regardless of how fast the observer is moving.
Time is Not Fixed
Special relativity produced a stunning conclusion: time passes at different rates depending on how fast you are moving. The faster you travel, the slower time moves for you relative to someone standing still. At everyday speeds the effect is unmeasurably tiny, but GPS satellites moving at thousands of kilometers per hour must account for relativistic time dilation — without the correction, GPS navigation would drift by kilometers per day. E=mc² — perhaps the most famous equation in science — also came from this work.
The Bigger Picture
Einstein published his general theory of relativity ten years later, extending the ideas to gravity and accelerating motion. General relativity predicted black holes decades before they were observed, explained the bending of light around massive objects, and predicted gravitational waves confirmed 100 years after the theory was written. It remains the foundation of modern cosmology and our understanding of the large-scale structure of the universe.