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1915 - General Relativity - showing that gravity from matter warps space around it (which seems like voodoo to me).
1917 - Einstein mostly started the field of cosmology by applying General Relativity to the entire universe. This work contained predictions of black holes and the expanding universe -- but the latter notion was so unimaginable in 1917 that he inserted an artificial "cosmological constant" to offset expansion forces. (He later called this insertion his worst blunder.)
1925 - Bose-Einstein condensate - He joined Indian physicist Satyendra Bose in hypothesizing a fifth state of matter (after solid, liquid, gas and plasma). If matter is cooled to near absolute zero, they predicted, quantum effects will take over, giving it weird behavior such as climbing out of its container. This was achieved in 1995 by three U.S. physicists who won the 2001 Nobel Prize for it.
1926 - Einstein patented a noiseless, leakproof refrigerator pump with Leo Szilard, his former student. Einstein also eventually patented a hearing aid, compasses and a light-intensity self-adjusting camera.
1932 - With astronomer Willem de Sitter, he removed the cosmological constant, thus correcting his 1917 cosmology theory.
1935 - With physicists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, he attempted to discredit the snowballing field of quantum mechanics, which always seemed too vague and nonspecific for Einstein - but subsequent science proved him wrong.
1935 - Einstein-Rosen Bridge - The two hypothesized that matter sucked into a black hole could travel through a space-time passage (dubbed a "wormhole" by physicist John Wheeler in 1957) and emerge from a spewing "white hole".
1936 - Gravitational lens - Einstein predicted that gravity from whole galaxies or clusters of galaxies would bend passing light so much that distant stars could appear in several places simultaneously. Now such "Einstein rings" and "Einstein crosses" are found in the sky.
Until his death in 1955, Einstein spent his remaining mental energy on a futile search for a grand unification theory (unified field theory) to explain all phenomena, causing some younger colleagues to worry that he wasted his mature genius on the impossible. Today, "string theory" pursues this quest, with no more success than Einstein achieved.
The shaggy genius - who wore proper suits when young, progressing to wild hair and sweatshirts - also is known for humanitarian pursuits such as crusades against war and attempts to establish world government. He's further known for sailing, questioning religion, playing the violin, dallying with women and hiking in forests.
Despite his astounding intellect, Einstein had gentle humility and the ability to laugh at himself. He felt deep reverence for the mysterious order of nature, from the precise behavior of subatomic particles to the mammoth gyrations of galaxies.
When Einstein died, President Dwight Eisenhower eulogized:
"No other man contributed so much to the vast expansion of 20th-century knowledge. Yet no other man was more modest in the possession of the power that is knowledge, more sure that power without wisdom is deadly."
And The New York Times commented:
"Man stands on this diminutive Earth, gazes at the myriad stars and upon billowing oceans and tossing trees - and wonders: What does it all mean? How did it come about? The most thoughtful wonderer who appeared among us in three centuries has passed on in the person of Albert Einstein."
He was a marvel, perhaps history's greatest example of profound capability within the human mind.
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