While working in a patent office in Bern, Switzerland, Albert Einstein drew what would become 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 that he sent 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’, whose operation Einstein masterfully expressed.
During 1905 Albert Einstein began to build his career, in that year he sent four articles for publication. The first explained the photoelectric effect and the second investigated experimental evidence on 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 vision of the relationship between mass and energy.
The phrase origin of the equation
Today we know perfectly well the equation E=mc2 where ‘E’ represents the energy and the letters ‘m’ and ‘c’ describe the mass and the velocity constant. But that was not how Einstein expressed it in his article titled ‘Does the inertia of a body 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 phrase in German that translated into Spanish reads like this:
“If a body gives up energy L in the form of radiation, its mass decreases by L/V2.”
Later, Einstein translated his physical reflection into the famous equation that became E=mc2, and which could be overshadowed by the simplicity of the mathematical expression, but which actually contains within it the explanation of why stars burn with such force. and a series of other phenomena. Thanks to it we now know that the energy contained in a small amount of mass could unleash an extraordinary explosion of energy.
Taking into account that the speed of light is 300 thousand kilometers per second, an already enormous value, squared it becomes an extraordinary amount of energy, as long as the conditions that the equation describes are met. This relationship explains nuclear energy which produces incredible amounts of energy from the nucleus of a single atom.
In fact, the principle of Albert Einstein’s equation was later used to create the atomic bomb that was dropped on Japan during World War II. This fact tormented the German physicist who was credited with the creation of the artifact when he had no participation, except for having developed the equation decades before what happened.
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.