[00:02.70]Unit 20 New Frontiers

[00:06.15]Lesson 3 Scientific Breakthroughs

[00:10.11]PIONEERS OF SCIENCE

[00:12.16]In the summer of 1905,

[00:14.40]a young man was sitting at home

[00:15.97]after a day's work.

[00:18.04]While rocking his one-year-old baby,

[00:20.87]he thought something over.

[00:22.34]Suddenly, it came to him!

[00:24.80]The equation "e=mc2" was born,

[00:28.78]an equation which would change

[00:30.44]our understanding of the universe

[00:32.31]but would also help to create the nuclear bomb.

[00:35.86]Albert Einstein was aware

[00:37.29]of recent developments,

[00:39.38]such as Marie Curie's research,

[00:42.33]but he had been working on his own.

[00:45.20]His world-famous equation showed

[00:47.12]how a small piece of mass could produce

[00:50.74]an unbelievable amount of energy.

[00:52.98]Einstein then showed

[00:54.47]in his "theory of relativity"

[00:56.35]that not even time, mass or length

[00:59.37]are constant - they change according

[01:02.05]to our experience of them.

[01:04.13]For example, if we could see people moving

[01:06.53]at the speed of light,

[01:08.14]they would appear much heavier

[01:09.87]and larger and would seem to move very slowly.

[01:12.34]