Albert Einstein: changing the world at 26

In 1905 a 26-year-old patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, wrote five papers that changed physics forever: light comes in packets of energy, the size of molecules, the jiggling particles in water (evidence that atoms are real), special relativity, and E = mc².

Albert Einstein was born on 14 March 1879 in Ulm, Germany. In 1919, starlight measured during a solar eclipse was found to bend just as he predicted. Yet his 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics was for discovering the law of the photoelectric effect, not for relativity!