The scientific touchstone of our age, the bomb, space travel, electronics-all bear his fingerprints. It was Einstein who saw it. Space and time were not apples and oranges, he realized, but mates-joined homologous, inseparable. Well, we all know that now. All this was shocking and revolutionary and yet strangely attractive, to the public as well as to scientists.
Light has mass.
Newspapers and popular magazines went wild. More than 100 books on relativity appeared within a year. The very name relativity fueled the fervor, for accidental and wholly unscientific reasons. In this new age, recovering from a horrible war, looking everywhere for originality and novelty and modernity, people could see that absolutism was no good. Everything had to be looked at relative to everything else.