Effective contribution to the “Night with Albert”
On 3 June 2016, the Bernese Historical Museum held a “Night with Albert” – an invitation to embark on a quest of one day and one night to get to know Albert Einstein. An experimental setup on the photoelectric effect, on loan from the Physics Department at ETH Zurich, provided visitors with the opportunity of actively discovering one of Einstein's groundbreaking works.
The experiment comes from the extensive collection of lecture experiments at the Physics Department. In the framework of the project “Experiments/Wanderzirkus”, the department has put together a variety of experiments that are compact, stable and easy to transport, so that they can be easily set up outside ETH.
The Bernese Historical Museum (Bernisches Historisches Museum) has used this opportunity. The experiment on the photoelectric effect gave visitors of the “Night with Albert” to playfully explore the effect that was first explained theoretically by Einstein. For that achievement he has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921.