In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper explaining the photoelectric effect, the emission of electrons from a material when struck by light, from his office at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, Switzerland. Einstein proposed that light consisted of discrete packets of energy later called photons, whose interaction with electrons was purely electrical. This paper, written in Bern, provided crucial evidence for the quantum theory of light and earned Einstein the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, fundamentally linking optical and electrical phenomena at the quantum level.

Einstein's photoelectric effect paper contributed to the quantum revolution that shattered classical physics' deterministic worldview, a shift that paralleled and influenced the fragmentation of certainty in modernist literature. The idea that energy came in discrete, indivisible packets rather than continuous flows resonated with modernist poetry's movement away from flowing Victorian verse toward discontinuous, concentrated forms. The quantum vision of a world governed by probability rather than certainty shaped the philosophical underpinnings of literary modernism, from the poetry of Wallace Stevens to the prose of Franz Kafka.