Generally considered one of the most influential physicists in history, Albert Einstein’s (1879-1955) groundbreaking theories reshaped the scientific community's view and understanding of the universe. He developed the special and general theories of relativity and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect.
Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Frank Wilczek is a theoretical physicist who won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for a discovery in the world of quarks, the building blocks of the atomic nucleus.
His latest book, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces was released by Basic Books in 2008.
Q: In 2004 you won the Nobel Prize for a discovery in the world of quarks, the building blocks of the atomic nucleus. Was this a concept known to Einstein and, if so, what was his contribution to it?
A: Einstein's direct contribution to nuclear physics was basically zero. He spent the last thirty years of his life trying to find a "unified field theory" but he seems to have hoped that gravitational and electromagnetic forces would supply all the clues that he needed to build such a theory.The strong force that holds together an atomic nucleus is the most powerful force in nature, but it was the last to be understood. The quark concept didn't emerge until a few years after Einstein's death. The breakthrough in my Nobel Prize work, which provided the basic equations governing quarks and predicted the properties of the gluons that connect them, came in 1973 (when I was 21-years-old). It established the theory known as quantum chromodynamics or QCD.
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