During his 'miraculous year,' Albert Einstein published four groundbreaking papers, including the postulates of special relativity.

One of Einstein's papers challenged quantum theory but helped confirm entanglement

Known for his theories of relativity, Albert Einstein's Nobel Prize in physics was for his discovery of the photoelectric effect, which makes digital cameras possible.

Albert Einstein's theory of gravity arose from what he described as 'the happiest thought of his life': realizing that a person who fell off the roof of their house would not feel their own weight as they fell.

Discoveries in electromagnetism, which suggested that light traveled at a single speed, became the catalyst for overturning Isaac Newton's view that all speeds are relative.

Although associated with his theories of relativity, Albert Einstein initially viewed the concept of spacetime, which originated with his teacher, Hermann Minkowski, negatively.

Explore Albert Einstein's Zürich notebook and review his notes on relativity

Mathematician David Hilbert developed general relativity equations before Einstein

Scientists validated Albert Einstein's theory of gravity by measuring the apparent positions of stars via their starlight as it traveled near the sun on its way to Earth during a total solar eclipse.

Almost three centuries before Albert Einstein presented the special theory of relativity, Galileo Galilei devised a principle of relativity involving uniform motion.

While special relativity describes motion along flat spacetime—the underlying fabric of the universe—general relativity extends this theory to explain motion through curved spacetime.

Once an employee at the Swiss Patent Office, Albert Einstein held approximately 50 patents, including ones for a refrigerator, hearing aids, and a blouse design.

A look at the giants of quantum mechanics

By combining special relativity with quantum mechanics, antimatter was predicted four years before it was observed, though the math suggested it possessed negative energy.

The first Nobel Prize ceremony, which honored the discovery of X-rays and the cofounder of the Red Cross, occurred five years after Alfred Nobel's death.

Photons are both particles of light and messengers of the electromagnetic force

Visualize how the order of events changes, according to special relativity, when the perspective is changed between observers who move relative to one another.

With the original lost following its submission for publication, Albert Einstein reauthored his manuscript on special relativity for a World War II bond rally.

Einstein created a mathematical term for anti-gravity to keep the universe static

Watch an animated derivation of the mass-energy equivalence, or E = mc², as a consequence of special relativity.

View the evolution of atomic models, with four successively overturned between 1900 and 1926

By measuring them in hot-air balloons during a partial solar eclipse and at night, Victor Hess discovered cosmic rays and concluded they came from beyond the solar system.

The 2011 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for the discovery of dark energy, which has driven the accelerated expansion of the universe.

To develop general relativity, Einstein relied on his college friend, Marcel Grossman

Worried that Nazi Germany could weaponize nuclear fission first, Albert Einstein wrote a 1939 letter warning President Roosevelt about the possibility of atomic bombs—a decision he later regretted.

Gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime that result from the motion of objects—were detected a century after Albert Einstein predicted their existence upon developing his theory of gravity.

Albert Einstein taught courses in Davos

Nearly 50 years before the first observational evidence, a soldier fighting on the Eastern Front in World War I found a mathematical solution to Einstein's equations that suggested the existence of black holes.

Observations of colliding neutron stars by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in 2017 confirmed that gravity travels at the speed of light.

A Belgian Catholic priest was the first to come up with the idea for the Big Bang

With rules established when scientists worked in small labs or in isolation, the Nobel Prizes have struggled to reflect the collaborative nature of modern research.

As of 2025, only five people have won two Nobel Prizes, with Marie Curie the only person to do so in two different sciences.

A breakdown of the experimental test results supporting the general theory of relativity

The discovery of the neutron paved the way for nuclear weapons

As of 2025, the most cited papers in science include a review of graphene, methods to improve image recognition, streamlining electron density calculations, and optimizing protein studies.

As of 2026, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which advises the pope on scientific matters, has included 90 Nobel laureates among its members.

Explore a simplified breakdown of the Einstein field equations

The 2018 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for applications in laser physics, including the creation of light-based tweezers.

The discovery of nuclear fission was facilitated by the discovery of the neutron

Since 1901, the Nobel Prizes have honored major global achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace efforts.

Marie Curie's research on radioactivity made her the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person to win awards in two sciences.

Georges Lemaître, a Belgian Catholic priest who proposed the Big Bang theory in 1931, became president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1960.

How neutron stars serve as laboratories for testing Einstein's theory of gravity

For the speed of light to be constant for all observers, space and time cannot be absolute, universal dimensions that are identical for everyone.

How a competition honoring a king's birthday uncovered history's first chaotic system

Experimenting with space-time

Ernest Rutherford's gold foil and nitrogen experiments revealed nuclear structure

Nature simultaneously published three papers on DNA—only the first made history

Italian physicist Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) on the Standard Model

For his 1922 Nobel Prize in physics, Niels Bohr was awarded a lifetime of free beer by Denmark's Carlsberg Brewery.

Because some models of the universe do not incorporate time, it may be an emergent property born from our limited perception of the universe, rather than a fundamental property of reality.