Rosie O’Donnell and Matthew Broderick both turn 43 today.

Albert Einstein was born on this date in 1879. (He died in 1955.)

The Writer’s Almanac has an essay on Einstein’s early years, concluding with this:

He said, “It was as if a storm broke loose in my mind.”

Einstein spent the next several weeks writing a paper on his theory, which came to be called the Special Theory of Relativity, the theory that if the speed of light is constant and if all natural laws are the same in every frame of reference, then both time and motion are relative to the observer. In other words, time and motion appear differently to someone traveling in a rocket ship than they would to someone standing on the ground as the rocket ship flies by.

That same year, 1905, Einstein published three more papers, each of which was as revolutionary as the first, including the paper that included his most famous equation: E = mc2, which means that there is tremendous energy trapped inside all particles. That equation was the theoretical basis for nuclear weapons. Years later, after the creation of the atom bomb, Einstein said, “If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.”