You would think it’s impossible to simultaneously spurn a professor and award him the greatest academic prize in the world, but you are not Allvar Gullstrand, and you are not snubbing Albert Einstein. Rather than award Einstein for his groundbreaking theory of relativity, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for discovering the photoelectric effect—unarguably significant work that helped in proving quantum theory, but not the theory that reshaped the fundamental understanding of matter and time.
This academic scandal, and the players involved—Einstein, Maxwell Planck, Gullstrand, and Carl Wilhelm Oseen—make up the dramatic motion of Robert Marc Friedman’s new play Transcendence: Relativity and Its Discontents, which was given a stage reading earlier this month at the APS meeting in Baltimore. See John Arnst’s full column on APS’s Physics Central.
