Albert Einstein: Opportunity and Perception∗

The year 1905 has been called Albert Einstein’s “Annus Mirabilis.” It was during that year that he caused revolutionary changes in man’s primordial concepts about the physical world: space, time, energy, light and matter. How could a 26-year-old clerk, previously unknown, cause such profound conceptual changes, and thereby open the door to the era of modern scientific technological world? No one, of course, can answer that question. But one can, perhaps, analyze some factors that were essential to his stepping into such a historic role. First of all, Einstein was extraordinary lucky: he was born at the right time, and was at the peak of his creative powers when the world of physics was shuddering from multiple crises. In other words, there was the lucky opportunity for him to change the course of physics, an opportunity unmatched, perhaps, since the time of Newton. Such lucky opportunities occur very very infrequently. In E. T. Bell’s Man of Mathematics, Lagrange (1736–1813) was quoted as having said: