Science - Religion Einstein's thoughts

[longship]

10. Alas, he never unified the theories.

Unfortunately, what he won the Nobel Prize for, the photoelectric effect, led to quantum physics, a theory which he rejected. He later said, “To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.” So he never again was an authority. That was left to others.

But 1905 was his glorious year, four papers any one of which were Nobel Prize worthy, all while he was a simple Swiss patent clerk. A paper on Brownian motion which established the atomic theory, one on the photoelectric effect which established the groundwork of quantum theory, and two papers on special relativity, which took the electrodynamics of Maxwell well into a new universe. And then, in 1915, he completed the theory of relativity with a new theory of gravity.

I recommend Walter Isaacson's biography. It is a great read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/books/09masl.html