The definitive proof of the “atomic hypothesis” had to wait until 1905. It was found by a rebellious twenty-five-year-old who had studied physics but had not been able to find employment as a scientist and was making ends meet by working as an employee in the patent office in Berne. I will speak a lot about this young man in the rest of this book, and about the three articles he sent to the most prestigious physics journal of the time, the Annalen der Physik.
