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This Day in Science History --

(June 09 - Einstein's first paper of his miracle year was published)

117 years ago, between March and September 1905, the mailbox of the German scientific journal "Annales der Physik", the world’s premier physics journal at the time, received four papers that would forever change the laws of physics and, ultimately, our conception of reality: of light, of matter, of time, and of space. The author was a young man aged 26, , who worked as a clerk at the patent office in Bern (Switzerland).

On March 17, Einstein completed the first of this remarkable series. Received by the journal on March 18, and published on June 9, the paper was titled ‘Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichttspunkt’ ("On a heuristic point of view concerning the generation and conversion of light"). This paper was the first shot in the revolution. In this paper Einstein framed, unambiguously, the hypothesis that light in its interaction with matter behaves like a particle with a discrete amount or `quantum' of energy proportional to its frequency. Sixteen years later, this theory of the effect would take Einstein to the summit of science when, in 1921, he received the for Physics.

Via Cosmological Astrophysics