Albert Einstein

Physicists including Max Planck and Niels Bohr rejected light quanta. Millikan's photoelectric experiments and Compton scattering settled it in 1919.

In 1905 I postulated that light consists of localized quanta, each carrying energy hf, and showed this explains the photoelectric effect. The idea was nearly universally rejected at first, then confirmed by experiment.

Physical cosmology research from 1917 to 1931, including a steady-state model I explored in early 1931 and quickly abandoned.

In 1917 my research applied general relativity to the structure of the universe as a whole, founding a static model. After Hubble's 1929 discovery that galaxies recede, I abandoned it for dynamic models and discarded the cosmological constant.

Received 30 June 1905, published 26 September 1905. Max Planck was the first leading physicist to accept it; Minkowski recast it geometrically in 1908.

My research paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" resolved the conflict between Maxwell's equations and Newtonian mechanics by changing the laws of mechanics. It became the special theory of relativity, the physics that gave us E = mc2.

A collaboration across continents: Bose's counting method, my extension to atoms, and an experimental confirmation 71 years later.

In 1924 I received Satyendra Nath Bose's statistical model of light as a gas of indistinguishable particles. I saw it applied to atoms too, translated and submitted his paper, and published my own research predicting the Bose–Einstein condensate.

Owen Willans Richardson had predicted the effect in 1908; de Haas and I designed the apparatus and measurement during my Berlin years.

In 1915, with Wander Johannes de Haas, I published two research papers claiming the first experimental observation that a change in a body's magnetic moment makes it rotate. This experimental physics showed magnetization comes from aligned electron angular momenta.