Einstein 1905. The genius at work

August 22nd 2004 – August 28th 2004

The exhibition has been realized by Euresis.

General coordinator: Mario Gargantini.

Staff: Enrico Gamba, Giorgio Guidi, Michele Isacchini, Lorenzo Mazzoni, Luca Signorini.

Scientific Consultant: Silvio Bergia.

2005 is the centenary of one of the biggest revolutions of all time: as a matter of fact, during 1905 a 26 years old boy called Albert Einstein, a third-class employee at the Patent Office in Bern, published on the prestigious Annalen der Physik a series of articles that would have changed the course of physics and deeply affected the cultural debates of the eighteenth century.

The author was completely out of the academic world; or better, that world had excluded him. After taking the degree in July 1900 at the Polytechnic in Zurich with good but not exceptional marks, he was not accepted for a job as assistant.

His critic attitude, his sharp irony, his impudent and even rude behaviour, created antipathy in hid professors, so that his scientific career could not even begin.

To earn his leaving young Einstein had to work as temporary teacher in schools and had to give private lessons, until he arrived to the Patent Office in Bern in June 1902. In the meantime he studied physics and discussed about it with his friends in cafés; in concrete, he had some scientific publications, but they were not enough to foresee the unbelievable exploit of 1905.

The one of Einstein is a peculiar scientific and human experience, both for the results and for the circumstances in which these results were reached. And this experience gives us an image of Einstein which is different from the one of the “white-haired genius” we all know.

1905 is the “annus mirabilis”, no doubt for the relativity theory, for the most famous formula of physics E = mc2, but also for the other two subjects of Einstein’s publications: the Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect.

The theory about the photoelectric effect, with its hypothesis of the light or photon quantum, is considered far more revolutionary for the physics of relativity: this is to say that if Einstein had not written anything about the theory of relativity, he would have been all the same one of the most important physicians of the eighteenth century.

The exhibition shows and fully explains all the works that came out in 1905, and offers a human and scientific itinerary outlining the novelties of Einstein’s ideas, their birth and their development.

The exhibition begins with an introductive section about the biographic, historical and scientific news of the period from 1879 – date of Einstein’s birth – to 1905. The second section is divided into three areas for the three themes of 1905 articles, that is relativity, the photoelectric effect and the molecular theory of Brown’s motion.

The last section is about the evolution of physics after 1905 and about the scientific and technological consequences of Einstein’s discoveries. The exhibition is also provided with some displays through which the public can “interact” with those physical phenomena Einstein studied.