This volume of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein contains
the scientific work Einstein published during the first decade of
his career, and includes some of the most significant achievements
of twentieth-century physics. The first paper was written in 1900
by the twenty-one-year-old Einstein, newly graduated from the Swiss
Federal Polytechnical School, or ETH, in Zurich and still searching
in vain for a job. The last paper in this volume is the text of an
invited lecture given in 1909 to a major scientific meeting by
Einstein after he was appointed to his first academic post at the
University of Zurich. He had already been recognized as an
important theoretical physicist on the basis of the work reprinted
here, particularly the three masterpieces that appeared in quick
succession during 1905, Einstein's year of miracles. In one of
these papers Einstein showed how one could finally confirm the
ancient view that matter is composed of discrete atoms, and even
measure the numbers and masses of these atoms. In a second paper,
which even he referred to as "very revolutionary," he argued that
the observed properties of thermal radiation suggest that it
consists not of waves, but rather of localized particles of energy
which he called energy quanta. The third and most famous paper set
forth the special theory of relativity, solving some long-standing
difficulties, but requiring a significant change in our
understanding of those basic concepts, space and time.
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