Physics and the MIRACLE YEAR.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

If you think understanding modern physics is tough, you should have tried it 100 years ago.

Sure, new stuff like string theory and dark energy can fry the average brain faster than a shooting star burning out in the night sky. But spare a little sympathy for those scientists of 1905 who smugly believed they had the answers to all the big questions pretty much sewed up and the only thing left was to mop up a few cosmic details.

Then along comes this 26-year-old clerk working in the Swiss patent office, a nobody from nowhere named Albert Einstein, who drops a few papers on the doorstep and turns their comfortable world on its ear. Those papers so altered the concepts of space and time, matter and energy and atoms and molecules that they redefined reality and were so profoundly important that 1905 is now considered the "annus mirabilis," the Miracle Year.

And they helped make Albert Einstein an icon. He was perhaps the first scientist to attain the cultural equivalent of rock star status, and his very name became a synonym for intellectual achievement. He was the Shakespeare of science, the man Time magazine would end up naming the Person of the Century.

"Einstein is certainly the person in the 20th century that most people think of when they think of physics," said Jim Brau, a physics professor at the University of Oregon.

To honor the man and his miracle year, the U.S. General Assembly has named 2005 the World Year of Physics. Events are being held around the globe to remind people of the importance of Einstein's work and, in the United States, to restore some of the glitter to a field that lately has had a harder time attracting funding and students.

Several events are planned at the UO, including a public lecture on Einstein by renowned physicist Kip Thorne. The talk will be March 24 at 7 p.m. in Room 100, Willamette Hall.

Jim Isenberg, a UO mathematics professor who studies Einstein's equations, said the World Year of Physics serves three purposes.

"It's to remind people that our picture of the physical universe changes, that how we look at the physical universe profoundly affects our life and that this is fun stuff to think about," he said.

OK, some of Einstein's theories are only fun in the sense that it's fun to get on one of those big spinner rides at a carnival that leave you reeling drunkenly when you get off. Special relativity and the quantum nature of light, two of Einstein's 1905 blockbusters, are kind of like that.

But at least one of his breakthroughs is relatively easy to understand, if only because it has become such a mundane part of basic science. In a paper describing something called Brownian motion, Einstein laid out clear evidence that all matter - whether solid, liquid or gas - is made up of little particles called atoms that are in constant motion and that as they moved faster the hotter they became.

Simple, huh? But it wasn't so cut-and-dried back in 1905, when there was still much debate among scientists over the idea.

"We kind of take the atomic nature of matter for granted today, but 100 years ago there were still people who weren't convinced," said Dennis Gilbert, a physics instructor at Lane Community College. "It was the Brownian motion paper that convinced them."

Einstein's paper on special relativity was similarly convincing. In it, he described a model of the universe in which space and time are linked into a single entity often referred to with a single word: spacetime.

Special relativity churns out all kinds of brain-scrambling scenarios, like clocks that slow down and rulers that shrink as speed increases. The bottom line is that only the speed of light is absolute and that everything else, including time and space, is relative to your frame of reference.

But it's something that is so hard to describe in a reasonable number of words that as part of the World Year of Physics, the tire company Pirelli is offering a prize of 25,000 euros (about $32,500) for the best five-minute explanation of the theory.

The 1905 paper that took the longest to gain acceptance was on what Einstein called the photo-electric effect. It described the dual nature of light, that it exists as both a wave and as individual packets of energy, called quanta.

That's the paper that gave Einstein the Nobel Prize in 1921, even though it took that long and more for many physicists to fully grasp its implications. It was the starting point for the field of quantum mechanics, the model that describes the odd world of the atomic and subatomic that Einstein himself refused to accept.

To round out the year, Einstein expanded on the earlier work and tossed out a nifty little way to show the equivalence of energy and matter with an equation that just about everybody now knows, even if they don't understand it: E=mc2.

So what's that to you? In a way, almost everything.

It's hard to think of much that we have today that doesn't in some way link back to some of the fundamental ideas that Einstein developed or refined. The chips that run everything from computers to coffee makers, the MRIs that help diagnose illness and the drugs that treat them, the lasers that play CDs and the satellites that provide your television signal all grew from science that uses Einstein's theories, even that remote control.

"Any time you're sitting there changing channels, you're using the photo-electric effect," said Stan Micklavzina, a physics instructor at the UO.

Sure, these things would have been figured out eventually without Einstein, but not as quickly and probably not as elegantly. Even today, scientists are awed by the way Einstein could come up with ideas that seemed simple on the surface yet were revolutionary in scope.

"The remarkable thing about Einstein is he was searching beyond the everyday experimental activities," Brau said. "He came up with some simple principles, then became convinced they were correct and then extrapolated to the consequences. But how did he know he was right when he had special relativity?"

It's those leaps that define Einstein's legacy and that still capture our imaginations when today's scientists again open up our understanding of the universe. And although in recent years some have been tempted to suggest - just as some of Einstein's contemporaries did in 1905 - that all the great discoveries have been made, it's almost certain that we will again have our ideas of space and time turned on their head.

"It kind of reminds us that it happened once and it could happen again," said Gilbert. "It tells us that our fundamental intuitions sometimes need to change, and they very likely will."

CAPTION(S):

UO professor Dr. Stan Micklavzina demonstrates Albert Einstein's theory of photoelectric effect by exposing a laser light in swirling smoke. Throughout 2005 - the World Year of Physics - events are being held worldwide, including at the UO, to honor Einstein's monumental work.