Stephen Wolfram

I didn't know until I was researching this recently.

In 1904 and 1903, Einstein wrote three different papers.

And so, you know, just sort of well-known physics history.

In 1905, Einstein wrote these three papers.

One introduced relativity theory, one explained Brownian motion, and one introduced basically photons.

So kind of, you know...

kind of a big deal year for physics and for Einstein.

But in the years before that, he'd written several papers, and what were they about?

They were about the second order of thermodynamics, and they were an attempt to prove the second order of thermodynamics and their nonsense.

And so I had no idea that he'd done this.

Me neither.

And in fact, what he did, those three papers in 1905, well, not so much the Bell 70 paper, the one on Brownian motion, the one on photons, both of these were about the story of sort of making the world discreet.

And he got that idea from Boltzmann.

But Boltzmann didn't think, you know, Boltzmann kind of died believing, you know, he said, he has a quote actually, you know, in the end, things are going to turn out to be discreet and I'm going to write down what I have to say about this because, you know, eventually this stuff will be rediscovered and I want to leave, you know, what I can about how things are going to be discreet.

But, you know,

I think he has some quote about how one person can't stand against the tide of history in saying that matter is discrete.

Oh, so he's stuck by his guns in terms of matter is discrete.

Yes, he did.

And what's interesting about this is

At the time, everybody, including Einstein, kind of assumed that space was probably going to end up being discrete too.