While working in a patent office in Bern, Switzerland, Albert Einstein drew what would be his greatest legacy, the one that broke the way humanity understood physics. It was on September 27, 1905, during his stay at the patent company, that the German scientist published the last of the four articles he submitted that year to the scientific journal Annalen der Physik. In it, he introduced the most important equation in the history of physics, the revolutionary ‘E=mc2′, and Einstein’s masterly explanation of how it worked.
In 1905, Albert Einstein was beginning to build his career, and in that year, he submitted four papers for publication. The first one explained the photoelectric effect; the second one explored the experimental evidence for the existence of atoms. But it was not until the third article that the tenor changed completely; here the German physicist introduced his famous theory of special relativity. And finally, in the fourth article, Einstein explained his view of the relationship between mass and energy.
The phrase origin of the equation
Today we know perfectly well the equation E=mc2 where ‘E’ stands for energy and the letters ‘m’ and ‘c’ describe the mass and the velocity constant. But this was not how Einstein expressed it in his paper entitled Does the inertia of a body to depend on its energy content, instead, he used ‘L’ for the accumulated energy and ‘V’ for the speed of light.
Einstein described the behavior of energy related to mass not in a mathematical way, but in a much more elegant way, through a German phrase that translated into English goes like this: “If a body gives up energy L in the form of radiation, its mass decreases by L/V2.″
Einstein later translated his physical reflection into the famous equation that became E=mc2, which might be overshadowed by the simplicity of the mathematical expression, but which actually contains in it the explanation of why stars burn with such impetus and several other phenomena. Thanks to it, we now know that the energy contained in a small amount of mass can trigger an extraordinary burst of energy.
Taking into account that the speed of light is 300 thousand kilometers per second, an already enormous value, squared becomes an extraordinary amount of energy, as long as the conditions described in the equation are met. This relationship explains the nuclear energy that produces incredible amounts of energy from the nucleus of a single atom. This was used maliciously decades later as we know, and its use tormented the German physicist who was credited with the creation of the device when he had no involvement, except for having developed the equation decades before the event.
More than a century has passed since Einstein discovered the intrinsic relationship between mass and energy, but neither time nor new discoveries have been able to overshadow the great legacy he left to science.
Story originally published in Spanish in Cultura Colectiva
