During five months in 1905, Einstein had upended physics by conceiving light quanta, special relativity, and statistical methods for showing the existence of atoms. Now he had just completed a more prolonged creative slog, from the fall of 1915 to the spring of 1917, which Dennis Overbye has called “arguably the most prodigious effort of sustained brilliance on the part of one man in the history of physics.” His first burst of creativity as a patent clerk had appeared to involve remarkably little anguish. But this later one was an arduous and intense effort, one that left him exhausted and
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