30 июня 1905 года Альберт Эйнштейн изложил основы специальной теории относительности

On that fateful day, the magazine Annals of Physics received an article by a modest patent office expert from Bern, titled On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. In the first part of the article, he set forth the bases of the new theory of space and time, and in the second one, he explained the application of this theory to electrodynamics of moving bodies. No one new at the moment that it was a revolution in the world of physic, a revolution much more important for the world than the Russian revolution of the same year. The modest patent expert’s name was Albert Einstein, and the publication laid the foundations for the theory of relativity. “Newton, forgive me,” Einstein asked in his short autobiographical essay published later. And he did it for a reason: his special relativity theory substituted Newton’s mechanics in describing the movement of bodies at a speed close to the speed of light. Well, let’s not go too deep: only few people can understand the theory of relativity. Arthur Eddington, a famous English astronomer, after being asked whether it was true that he was one of the three people in the world who understood Einstein’s theory of relativity, did not know what to say: he tried to remember who was the third one.