Special Section on Einstein

On January 30, 1933, the day Hitler and the Nazis took over the German government, the most famous scientist in the world may also have been the luckiest. Albert Einstein and his wife Elsa were away from their Berlin home on a visit to Pasadena, California his third winter there as a guest faculty member…

For more than two centuries after Newton published his theories of space, time, and motion in 1687, most physicists were Newtonians. They believed, as Newton did, that space and time are absolute, that force causes acceleration, and that gravity is a force conveyed across a vacuum at a distance. Since Darwin there are few professional…