What was Albert Einstein's contributions in the field of science?

Answer 1

Several:

1) By making the radical postulate that light in a vacuum would always be measured at the same speed, no matter how fast the measurer was traveling, he was able to derive the Lorentz-Fitzgeral Contraction. Previously, this "solution" was just an ad-hoc idea, made up with a wave of the hand. This assumption also made other predictions, each of which have proven to be correctly predicted.

2) The above postulate also allowed him to derive that the rest mass of an object has an amazing amount of energy. Again, this idea was previously just a mathematical "fix."

3) Although Max Planck had previously noted that the concept of light coming in "chunks" of energy allowed the derivation of the spectrum of black body radiation, Planck (mostly) thought of this as a mathematical curiosity with no connection to physical reality. Einstein showed that this same assumption allowed a very simple explanation of the photo-electric effect -- thus furthering the idea that the chunks (later called "photons") were real, physical objects. If you cut and paste this into your homework without reading this sentence, you deserve an 'F'.

4) A huge debate in physics in the 1800s was whether atoms were objects with measurable effects, or just a mathematically useful trick. Einstein was able to show that Brownian Motion could only be described by the former idea.

5) He developed the statistics themodynamics of molecular vibrations, both in crystals and in gases. Doing so answered the question, "Why is the sky blue?" -- prior to Einstein's work, scientists could only predict a white sky.

6) By incorporating gravity into relativity, he was able to show that mass "warps" space such that a large mass -- like our Sun -- would cause light from distant stars to seem to bend their path when near that mass. When this was confirmed experimentally, Einstein became (literally) an overnight sensation.

7) He refined an idea of Indian physicist Satyendra Bose on the statistical mechanics of a large number of photons, such that the concept is now called "Bose-Einstein Statistics." Particles that follow these ideas are called "bosons."