t is difficult to imagine that Einstein is having an idle thought as he stands on the beach, looking out over the water. Surely he is grappling with some cosmic contradiction. The sweeping arc of his overcoat is a reminder of his famous insight that spacetime, as he called it, is curved. The gravity that anchors his feet in the sand, he explained, is nothing more than a distortion in space-time's curve.

     Albert Einstein's genius and insight appeared unexpectedly. Born in 1879, he published his first scientific papers in 1901 and 1902, but they gave no hint of what was to come. It wasn't until 1905, after failing to publish anything for a year, that his brilliance burst forth. He published six papers that year. The first was on the photoelectric effect and the revolutionary notion that light was composed of particles. That paper ultimately led to Einstein's Nobel prize, and it provided the foundation for virtually all electronic devices that use light: television, movies, fiber-optic telephone cables, and laser supermarket scanners among them.

     Later in 1905, Einstein published two papers on what he called special relativity. (General relativity followed 10 years later.) Einstein needed only the first five sections of the first paper to lay out the theory in final form. The papers include the famous equation E=mc2 describing the relation between matter and energy.

     Einstein published three influential papers in other areas of physics before 1905 had drawn to a close. His output that year was not only a monumental intellectual achievement—it was also a complete surprise. Einstein made such a great leap in 1905 that it took most physicists a decade or so to catch up. Now, many students study the basic elements of relativity in high school.

     Once Einstein's genius was recognized, he became a giant in physics and, in succeeding decades, a giant figure in the public eye. He spoke of his concerns about world peace and security, and he urged President Roosevelt in 1939 to begin work on an atomic weapon, lest the Germans produce one first. Einstein spent his final years in Princeton, N.J., working quietly. He died in 1955, after asking that writing material and his latest calculations be brought to him at the hospital. He had become an inspiration to thinkers of all kinds, far beyond the realm of physics—even artists and writers grappled with the ideas of relativity. Yet he retained the simple faith with which he had begun: that nature operates by laws and that with enough thought and experiment, we might discover them.

PHOTO: CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY