WE PHYSICISTS have a habit of depicting our discipline as "beautiful" or "elegant", where an outsider might be forgiven for seeing no more than an endless morass of equations. In an ideal world, those equations would be unnecessary; the ultimate goal of physics – and science generally – is to describe the world as simply as possible.
One hundred years ago, one person brought us a great step closer. In this centenary year of general relativity, Albert Einstein is getting the plaudits, and no one would gainsay him that. But that same year, 1915, the excitement surrounding relativity spawned another seminal piece of work. Even among physicists, though, it is not nearly as famous as it should be. Perhaps that is down to the complexity of its mathematics, but perhaps the author's sex and sadly short life played their parts too. ...
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