Albert Einstein

It was the year 1905. A 26-year old patent clerk fresh out of a rather undistinguished university physics career wrote three articles in scientific journals that absolutely rocked the scientific world. And he did this in his spare time! These three papers were:

A paper explaining the so-called photoelectric effect as due to the quantum nature of light. This earned him the Nobel Prize in 1922. We will come back to this effect in the next chapter.
A paper explaining the effect of Brownian motion, the motion of very small particles in water or other solutions, as due to collisions with molecules and atoms, thus proving that atoms really exist. (This was not at all clear before his work.) This would have also been worth a Nobel Prize.
Finally, the most important of all: the theory of special relativity.

1879 Born in Ulm, Germany (March 14)
1902 Begins work at Swiss patent office
1905 Publishes the three seminal papers on theoretical physics
1916 Proposes general theory of relativity
1919 General relativity is proved correct during a solar eclipse
1922 Wins Nobel Prize in Physics
1933 Emigrates to US (Princeton, N.J.)
1939 Urges F.D.R. to develop atom bomb
1955 Dies in his sleep (April 18)

1905 was called the annus mirabile (the miracle year) of physics because of these three papers that were all published in the same volume of the journal Annalen der Physik.

Einstein became the symbol for quintessential archetypical scientist, a synonym for genius. Time magazine selected him as the "Person of the Century" .

Einstein was a German and a Jew. As such he stood at the intersection of the most powerful political movements of the 20th century, the clash between fascism and democracy. The German fascists needed a unifying enemy and made Jews the lightning rod of their aggression. This forced Einstein to flee to the U.S. and become an American. In writing his famous letter to President Roosevelt, he set in motion the largest-ever military-industrial machinery that built the atomic bomb.