Einstein's revolution

The famous Russian scientist Lev Landau used to keep a list of names, in wich he graded, physicists into ‘leagues’. The first division contained the names of physicists such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schroedinger, the founding fathers of modern quantum physics, as well as historical ‘giants’ such as Isaac Newton. He was rather modest about his own classification, grading himself 2½, although he later promoted himself to a 2. Most working physicists would be happy even to make it into Landau's fourth division: David Mermin, a well-known and perceptive American physicist, once wrote an article entitled ‘My life with Landau: homage of a 4½ to a 2’. What is the point of this story? The point is that any book about relativity is inevitably also about Albert Einstein, and Einstein was a remarkable physicist by any standard. Landau, in fact, created a special ‘superleague’ containing only one physicist, Einstein, whom he classified uniquely as a½. Thus, the popular opinion that Einstein was the greatest physicist since Newton is widely shared among professional physicists.

When Einstein wrote about ‘The wonderful events which the great Newton experienced in his younger days…’, and commented that, to Newton, Nature was ‘an open book’, he could well have been writing about himself.