"In contemplating the papers Einstein wrote in 1905, I often find myself wondering which of them is the most beautiful. ...My favorite ...is Einstein’s paper on the blackbody radiation. ...Einstein did not try to derive the Wien law. He simply accepted it as an empirical fact and asked what it meant. By a virtuoso bit of reasoning involving statistical mechanics (of which he was a master, having independently invented the subject over a three-year period beginning in 1902), he was able to show that... the radiation in the cavity was mathematically the same as that of a dilute gas of particles. As far as Einstein was concerned, this meant that this radiation was a dilute gas of particles—light quanta. ...He realized that if the energetic light quanta were to bombard, say, a metal surface, they would give up their energies in lump sums and thereby liberate electrons from the surface in a predictable way, something that is called the photoelectric effect. ...not many physicists were even interested in the subject of blackbody radiation ...Planck, who was interested, decided that Einstein’s paper was simply wrong."