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Purdue Kicks Off World Year of Physics with the
Grand Opening of New West Lafayette Public Library

The approaching year is the 100th anniversary of what scientists admiringly call annus mirabilis, a miraculous year. It should be an occasion to reflect on what one single scientist, Albert Einstein, accomplished in just one year.

In 1905 Einstein was a 25-year-old, relatively unknown, physicist working contentedly as an examiner in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. In that year alone he submitted for publication a stream of extraordinary scientific papers each of which by itself would have altered the face of science.

The World Year of Physics 2005 officially began in October 2004 and overlaps the celebration of 100 years since the publication of Einstein’s five great 1905 papers. The first of these was a revolutionary explanation of the photoelectric effect that was hard for many prominent scientists to swallow because it implied that light sometimes behaves like a wave and sometimes like a particle: it has dual properties.

After that came a molecular theory of Brownian motion, followed by a Ph.D. thesis proposing ways to determine molecular dimensions, then the special theory of relativity, and finally the convertibility of mass and energy. Young and old have heard of Einstein, but most have little idea of how he changed our concept of light, the relative nature of time, and sealed the proof of an underlying molecular structure of matter.

It was for this reason that Julie Conlon of Purdue Physics Outreach, in collaboration with Irwin Tessman from Biology, participated in the grand opening celebration of the new West Lafayette Public Library by displaying an appreciation of several of the1905 papers and presenting Millikan’s famous experiment that both verifies Einstein’s theory of the photoelectric effect and at the same time measures Planck’s constant.. Students enrolled in Physics 290M, Service Learning Physics, interacted with patrons to explain the concepts of the photoelectric effect.

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