How one man changed the universe in one year

It is 100 years since the 26-year-old Albert Einstein completed five ground-breaking scientific papers in his annus mirabilis . This explosion of creativity took place in a six-month period from March to September 1905. There is no comparable intellectual achievement in the history of science. Isaac Newton's year of isolation at his family home in Woolsthorpe, when he was driven from Cambridge by the threat of the plague in the summer of 1665, is often put forward as a second example. However, although it is likely that Newton did derive his inspiration for his theory of gravity during this time, more than 20 years passed before Newton published his Principia Mathematica . By contrast, Einstein's work appeared within months, fully formed and complete. This is the justification for John Rigden's subtitle, The Standard of Greatness .

In 1905, Einstein wrote a letter to one of his close friends, Conrad Habicht, in which he promised to send him four papers. The first of these, written in March on the particle nature of light - the first hint of the quantum mechanical wave-particle duality - Einstein himself called "very revolutionary". The second, written in April, "A new determination of molecular dimensions", demonstrated Einstein's belief in the still controversial kinetic theory of atoms. It showed that the size of molecules could be deduced from measurements on viscosity and diffusion. And it set the stage for his third paper, which was completed in May, a mere ten days later. Here, Einstein gave an atomic explanation of Brownian motion - the zigzag motion of fine pollen-like particles suspended in a liquid. When Einstein's predictions were confirmed in 1908 by the French physicist Jean Perrin, even the most diehard atomic sceptics capitulated, except for one of Einstein's heroes, Ernst Mach, who died in 1916 apparently still unconvinced.

These three papers would rank as a major achievement for most physicists, but Einstein had only just begun. In June, he submitted "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies", a new view of space and time that we now refer to as the special theory of relativity. Not content with challenging the wave theory of light and classical thermodynamics, in the third paragraph of this paper Einstein dismissed the theory of the "ether": "The introduction of a 'luminiferous aether' will prove to be superfluous because the view here to be developed will (not) require an 'absolutely stationary space'." This paper was followed in September with "Does the inertia of a body depend on its energy content?" In this, as an unanticipated consequence of his relativity paper, Einstein derived what is probably the best-known equation in physics, E=mc2 .

There are many fascinating anecdotes sprinkled throughout this book. One concerns the saga of Einstein's doctoral thesis. His first attempt in 1900 was unsuccessful, and his second attempt in 1901 was rejected. In 1905, Einstein tried again. According to his sister Maja, he first submitted his paper on relativity but this was rejected. He then submitted his paper on molecular dimensions, which he thought was void of any novel or startling content that could offend his professors. But this was returned as being too short. According to legend, Einstein added one sentence and returned the thesis, which was then accepted.

Another pantomime concerns his Nobel prize. One member of the physics committee went so far as to say: "Einstein must never receive a Nobel prize even if the whole world demands it." Despite overwhelming nominations for Einstein from 1920 onwards, the committee decided to award no physics prize in 1921. A year later they relented, and gave him the 1921 prize for his March 1905 paper - but with the condition that his prize address make no mention of relativity. When he gave his Nobel lecture in 1923, the King of Sweden, who was in the audience, wanted to know about relativity - so Einstein talked about it after all. With typical self-confidence he had already promised his first wife his Nobel prize money as part of her divorce settlement in 1919.

The circumstances under which Einstein wrote these papers are as remarkable as their content. At school in Germany and at university in Zurich, Einstein detested the pervasive attitude of conformity and of science taught purely for examinations rather than to provoke new insights. He acquired a reputation as a "difficult" student and was not offered an academic post when he graduated. After surviving by teaching and private coaching, Einstein managed in 1902 to obtain a position in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern as a "technical expert third class". Here, without any day-to-day contact with the academic physics community, he performed his miracles. His relativity paper contains no references and thanks only his lifelong friend from the Patent Office, Michele Besso. In September 1907, on being asked to review the recent developments in relativity, Einstein replied: "I must... note that I am not in a position to acquaint myself with everything published on this topic, because the library is closed during my free time."

In a thoughtful essay, "How can we be sure that Albert Einstein was not a crank?", the physicist Jeremy Bernstein imagines how he would have felt had he received these five papers out of the blue from an author with neither a university position nor a doctorate. Would he not have given them a cursory glance and consigned them to the waste-paper basket? In Einstein's case, the unsung hero is revealed by Rigden to have been Max Planck, the adviser on theoretical physics to the editor of the journal Annalen der Physik . It was Planck who determined to publish this complete unknown.

This is a fascinating portrait of Einstein's astonishing rise from obscurity to colossus of physics. My only mild regret is that there is no reprint of the actual papers as an appendix.

Tony Hey is professor of computation, Southampton University, and vice-president for technical computing, Microsoft.