View full lesson here: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/einstein-s-miracle-year-larry-lagerstrom As the year 1905 began, Albert Einstein faced life as a “failed” academic. Yet within the next...
========== As 1905 dawned, the soon-to-be 26-year-old Albert Einstein
faced life as a failed academic. Most physicists of the time
would have scoffed at the idea that this minor civil servant
could have much to contribute to science. Yet within the following year, Einstein would publish not one, not two, not three, but four extraordinary papers,
each on a different topic, that were destined to radically transform
our understanding of the universe. The myth that Einstein
had failed math is just that. He had mastered calculus on his own
by the age of 15 and done well at both
his Munich secondary school and at the Swiss Polytechnic, where he studied for
a math and physics teaching diploma. But skipping classes to spend
more time in the lab and neglecting to show pro...