Person
German-born theoretical physicist; Nobel Prize in Physics 1921 (received 1922); developed special and general relativity.
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist whose work transformed modern physics. In 1905 he published landmark papers on the light quantum, Brownian motion, and special relativity, and in 1916 completed the general theory of relativity, confirmed by the 1919 eclipse expeditions. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921 — awarded for the law of the photoelectric effect — and spent his final decades at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
A black hole is a region of spacetime whose gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape past its boundary, the event horizon. First imagined as 'dark stars' in the 18th century and predicted by Einstein's general relativity in 1915, black holes were long considered unobservable. Today they are studied through gravitational waves, X-ray binaries, and the orbits of stars — and were photographed directly for the first time by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2019 (M87*) and 2022 (Sagittarius A*).