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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves (1904-06) [source]Excerpt from a longer essay I am working on: In 1905, the painter Paul Cézanne was pushing himself relentlessly at the edges of perception, tossing torn paintings out the window in frustration (according to legend) and casting new depictions of space onto canvas with an unprecedented and hard-won level of abstraction. That year Einstein published three papers: one on Brownian Motion (providing a mathematical explanation for the apparently random, zig-zagging motion of particles suspended in liquid), one on special relativity (introducing the mind-bending physical law that the time and space are inextricably connected, such that the faster an object moves in space, the slower it moves in time), and a paper stating that light, previously considered exclusively as a wave, sometimes behaves like stream of discrete particles, tiny bundles or "quanta" of energy. The wave/particle theory laid the groundwork for quantum physics.