Cool Science

I caught a glimpse of the Tina Fey lifetime achievement award show and some of Steve Martin's routine. He talked about how comedians are only as good as their last joke and about how hard it is for somebody to rise to greatness in comedy. He joked that Einstein only had to discover 'one thing' to gain timeless fame...

But that's just it. If you think this is a time traveler, then Einstein is a shoe-in because what stuns us today in science is how MUCH he did. By this account, he wasn't just a time traveler, he was a sloppy one. He gave us the particle view of light, the theory of relativity, and the microscopic theory of diffusion and even more. All rocked science. And he even knew there would be more than quantum mechanics, perhaps foreshadowing string theory.

Historians have often lamented that the heavy hand of the Romans on the Greeks may have set back science and human knowledge by not tens but hundreds of years. I'll indulge in a little exaggeration, but to try to get a handle on the scale of Einstein's work, he single-handedly put us back on track.