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November 11, 2005|Volume 34, Number 11


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Albert Einstein drew on earlier work by Max Planck to outline the particle properties of light. This image is from the poster for the lecture.



Lecture will pay homage to Albert Einstein

To mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of Albert Einstein's famous 1905 paper on the particle properties of light, Professor Douglas Stone will present the Yale Engineering Dean's Distinguished Lecture on the topic "Genius and Genius2: Planck, Einstein and the Birth of Quantum Theory."

Stone will argue that Albert Einstein, arguably the most famous scientist in history, is underappreciated for his contributions to physics.

Stone is the Carl A. Morse Professor of Applied Physics, director of the Division of Natural Sciences and professor of physics at Yale. His own research is an outgrowth of Einstein's work, focusing on theoretical condensed matter and optical physics, quantum transport phenomena in disordered media, mesoscopic electron physics, quantum and wave chaos, quantum measurement, and quantum computing.

"We are fortunate to have in Professor Stone a unique scientist-scholar to enlighten and enthrall us with his insights on Albert Einstein's unequaled contributions to science," says Paul A. Fleury, dean of the Faculty of Engineering.

The lecture will take place on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 4 p.m. in Davies Auditorium, 15 Prospect St. A reception will follow. The event is free, and the public is invited.

In 1900, German physicist Max Planck proposed that the energy of mechanical systems was not continuous but was quantized to indivisible units of magnitude determined by the constant of nature, h, which now bears his name. Planck was forced to this radical hypothesis in order to explain the nature of thermal radiation, a central problem in the physics of the time.

The revolutionary and fundamental nature of Planck's quantum hypothesis remained unappreciated until a young patent clerk, Albert Einstein, began to unlock its meaning with his 1905 paper on the particle properties of light. That paper claimed that, in its interaction with matter, light behaved as a particle (what is now referred to as a photon). The idea was revolutionary, and the photon concept was not fully accepted in physics for the next 18 years.


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