Basic Research Changes The World Forever

Einstein saw how limited were Newton’s descriptions of these fundamental players in physics. The relationships Newtonian physics described between, say, energy and motion (i.e., velocity) did not tell the whole story. Einstein developed a more basic, more fundamental understanding of such relationships, and in the process, he gave physics new equations like E = mc² .

Einstein’s basic research changed the world forever. A list of the actual downstream applications from his paper would easily be as long as 2 ft. and would include everything from radiation therapy to hyper-accurate GPS satellites.