It was more than youth that gave young Einstein such willingness to plunge off in new directions to explain phenomena that had defied explanation in previous terms, but youth played an important role. 1905 was his great year of fruition. Max Planck had in 1901 come to the conclusion that it was impossible to explain the emission of light waves by atoms and molecules in terms of any conceivable adaptation of the classical theories of physics. So much of red light, so much of green, such an intensity of blue in the mixture—the ratios were known to depend mainly on how hot was the luminous object emitting them, whether sun or electric are. Planck had pointed out that only by assuming the existence of discrete packets of energy, the quanta or photons of light that we all now accept as real, could the observed distribution of energy from a hot glowing object be explained. Few were prepared to believe so radical a concept, until Einstein came forward with a new theory of the photoelectric effect, in which quanta appeared again as essential to an understanding of energy. Today the photoelectric effect, in which electrons are struck from metal plates by incoming light waves, is basic to many of our most common instruments: exposure meters, vacuum tubes to open doors for baggage-laden travelers, pickup tubes for television cameras. Einstein showed that to explain the basic phenomenon it was necessary again to assume that light came in tiny packets. Thus he got Planck's Quantum Theory off to a good start.

Soon he did violence to preconceptions again. He started thinking about certain inconsistencies in the explanation of specific heats. When an atom or a molecule vibrates, any person of common sense would suppose that it does so by an amount depending on the energy communicated to it, as a tree vibrates in the wind or a bell rocks when rung. This idea is correct for objects of ordinary size, but Einstein showed that ultramicroscopic objects vibrate with only certain amounts of energy, refusing to accept a change unless a definite increase in energy is communicated to them, so that they change their vibrating energy in discrete jumps. What a thrill of discovery he must have had when he found that using the quantum idea again cleared up the discrepancies!

That the basic action of energy is quantized, it has recently been pointed out by Schrodinger, probably explains how the hereditary genes can remain the same over the ages yet be susceptible to mutations when struck by a cosmic ray or any other unusual bundle of excessive energy. To explain the panorama of organic evolution one must have a gene which is very stable, yet capable of rapid change on occasion. The horseshoe crab, for example, has remained essentially the same for 160 million years, during which time its gene molecules have reduplicated themselves, millions of times. How can the gene, a molecule composed of many thousands of atoms, under the ceaseless buffetings of the atoms surrounding it remain stable enough to assemble inert matter into the bodies of horseshoe crabs identical with their ancestors of past ages? Easy, says Schrödinger, if you follow Einstein and the experimenters who have proved that his ideas were right. For at the temperatures at which living creatures exist, the vibrations that come in from other atoms jiggle the gone molecules effectively only seldom, because their energy acceptance is quantized. But subject them to high temperatures, or to mustard gas, or to cosmic rays, and an atom is easily knocked out of place so that a change is induced in the gene which results in production of a creature of slightly different characteristics. Thus a mutation can result, giving nature an occasional new opportunity for improving by selection, with the resulting great sweep of organic evolution.