Einstein Revisited, by Leonard Fine, nicely documents the content of Einstein’s six papers and their implications for chemistry and other sciences as well as for physics. In a single year Einstein’s work supported the idea that both energy and matter occur in quanta. The first paper, which explained the photoelectric effect in terms of quanta of radiation, brought to the attention of the scientific world Planck’s 1900 paper regarding quantization of energy. Three other papers involved the sizes of molecules in solution or Brownian motion due to collisions of molecules with larger, visible particles. Chemists might be credited with quantizing matter (based on stoichiometric relationships and stereochemistry), but in 1900 one of the founders of physical chemistry, Wilhelm Ostwald, avoided discussing hypothetical objects—such as atoms—in a textbook. Einstein’s pioneering work on quantization of both energy and matter significantly shortened the lifetime of such views.

Most scientists know that in 1905 Einstein had a very good year, but can we draw conclusions beyond the tremendous impact of Einstein’s thought on physics? I think we can. First, fundamental work in one discipline can have great influence on many others. The great success of the atomic hypothesis in supporting 20th-century development of industrial and medicinal chemistry is indebted to Einstein. The paper on the photoelectric effect influenced not only physics, but also chemistry, surface science, materials science, biology, and even medicine (where photon energies relate to cell damage). This is even more important today, with a much larger number of scientists in a broader range of disciplines needing to know about discoveries in many other fields.

Fine notes a second aspect of Einstein’s work: “He asked better questions of nature than any human being had in nearly 250 years, and he was rewarded with more right answers than could be expected.” Asking the right questions is crucial to scientific work, but this is an aspect that is woefully neglected when students are introduced to science. Getting the right answer is usually the thing to do, and as Fine indicates, even a genius must be counted lucky to get the right answer a significant fraction of the time. Right answers are not easy to come by. They require persistent, intelligent (and nowadays often expensive) work. If students learned this early, they would have a better picture of what really happens when science is done.

That even a genius can speak in a confusing way about his own discoveries is exemplified by Einstein’s 1931 radio interview quoted by Fine, “Furthermore the equation E is equal to m c squared, in which energy is put equal to mass, multiplied with the square of the velocity of light, showed that very small amounts of mass may be converted into energy, and vice versa.” Two papers in this issue (article 1, 2) belie this statement, as does the equation itself, which shows that energy is proportional to mass, with the square of the speed of light as the proportionality constant. A more correct statement would be that decreasing the mass (and energy) in a system can increase the energy (and mass) of the surroundings. Because the proportionality constant is so large, an immeasurably small decrease in mass of a system can result in an easily measured increase in energy of the surroundings. A measurable change in mass of the system results in a cataclysmic increase in energy of the surroundings.

Finally, Einstein’s work was revolutionary. Before his 1905 papers, many physicists thought that everything was well understood with only a few loose ends to tie up. Physics could then be applied to understanding all of the other sciences, which in turn would also yield to scientific understanding. Einstein’s work caused a real Kuhnian paradigm shift—a term so overused that it has been deprived of meaning almost completely.

Amid calls for paradigm shifts in teaching of chemistry, we ought to consider whether we are as ready for change as physics was in 1900. In one sense, perhaps we are. We have been teaching the same content using essentially the same methods for a long time, so it would be easy to conclude that we know exactly how to do it (or think we do). However, anyone who has taught and then thought even a little about the process knows that we don’t know how to do it very well at all. We have nothing like the broad range of data, observations, and well tested theories that characterized physics at the turn of the 20th century. One might ask, do we even have phlogiston yet? Maybe we need a Lavoisier instead of an Einstein, so that what we do know could be appropriately categorized and clarified as a means of encouraging more rapid growth in our understanding of how students learn.

Of course, if there is an Einstein reading this, please send those six papers to this Journal next year!