Alice's Red Queen can accept many impossible things before breakfast, but it takes a supremely confident mind to do so. Einstein, age 26, sees light as wave and particle, picking the attribute he needs to confront each problem in turn. Now that's tough. And of course, Einstein isn't finished. At first, even Einstein does not grasp the full implications of his formula, but even then he suggests that the heat produced by radium could mark the conversion of tiny amounts of the mass of the radium salts into energy.
Historians call it the annus mirabilis, the miracle year.
And that alone would have been enough to secure Einstein's reputation. Before anyone else, Einstein recognizes the essential dualism in nature, the co-existence of particles and waves at the level of quanta. In 1911 he declares resolving the quantum issue to be the central problem of physics. Even the minor works resonate. His paper on the phenomenon called critical opalescence solves the problem by examining the cumulative effect of the scattering of light by individual molecules in the atmosphere.