forms today—among them, capturing the wind, harnessing the energy that is being created by the giant nuclear fusion furnace of the sun, harvesting energy from the richness of the soil, improving efficiency wherever we use energy, and remaking the vehicles that carry us all about.
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ALCHEMY OF SHINING LIGHT
Albert Einstein possessed a power of mind that would do nothing less than forge a new understanding of the universe. In the summer of 1900, he had a more immediate problem. Diploma in hand, he really needed to find a job. He had hoped for a university position, but it was not to be. None of Einstein’s professors would give him a positive recommendation, in part due to a mediocre diploma essay as well as his reputation for being, as one of his professors put it, a “lazy dog.” Yet whatever his supposed sloth, this rebellious student had not only extraordinary gifts for mathematics and physics but also the capability to marshal them with momentous results. But that was not enough to get him employed.
While hunting for a job, Einstein tried to support himself by doing some private tutoring in math and physics. He even advertised in a local paper, offering prospective students free trial lessons for what he billed as “exceedingly thorough” services. His family, its finances stretched, could not provide much financial assistance, but they were clearly worried about him. Unbeknownst to Albert, his father, Hermann, went so far as to write a chemistry professor asking for help. “My son,” he said, “feels deeply unhappy & each day the thought gains strength in him that his career has been derailed & he cannot find a connection any longer. He is moreover depressed at the thought that he is a burden to us, who are not very well off.”
But then Einstein had a lucky break. He landed a job at the Swiss patent office in Bern. In June 1902 he reported for work at the patent office in the new Postal and Telegraph Building, near the railway station. Examining patent applications was not very taxing work for the intellectually curious young physicist, but most important, it would provide him the security he needed—and the time.
The patent office was actually a good fit for Einstein. He was interested in the practical as well as theoretical, particularly when it came to electricity. After all, his father was an engineer. Hermann and his youngest brother, Jakob, ran an electric generation company in Munich. Part of the first generation of entrepreneurs building on Edison’s revolution in electric power, they were at the forefront of the high tech of the day. They competed with companies like Siemens for contracts to illuminate the towns and cities of Europe. Unfortunately, Hermann and Jakob Einstein lost out on a contract to light the Munich city center and were never really able to make a go of their business. But at least Hermann Einstein no longer had to worry about his son’s job prospects.1
TEN WEEKS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD
Ensconced at the patent office and with time on his hands, Einstein eventually went to work on a pent-up store of problems that were filling his mind. Over a period of just ten weeks in the summer of 1905, in an astonishing burst of creativity and analysis, he would turn out five papers that would transform the understanding of the universe and change the world in which we live. One of them was called “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon Its Energy Content?” This was the paper with perhaps the most famous equation ever: e=mc2. That paper laid the theoretical foundations for both exploiting the terrifying potential of nuclear reactions in the atomic bomb and harnessing nuclear reactions for peaceful power.
One of the other papers had the obscure title “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light.” This paper, Einstein wrote to a friend, “deals with radiation and the energy properties of light and is very revolutionary.” In the paper, Einstein proposed the hypothesis that matter and radiation can interact only by way of the exchange of independent “quanta” of energy. He demonstrated that this hypothesis explains a number of phenomena, including what he called the “photoelectric effect.”2
In so doing, the paper provided the theoretical foundations for what, more than a century later, is the rapidly growing photovoltaics industry, an industry that many see as the ultimate future for renewables. The significance of that paper from the summer of 1905 was summed up succinctly more than