Albert Einstein is perhaps the most famous scientist in history to the minds of most of those living today. He was a theoretical physicist who made completely revolutionary contributions to physics, contributions that not only laid the groundwork for general relativity and quantum mechanics but that changed humanity's way of looking at the universe. Hawking discusses Einstein at the beginning of the first chapter and spends the rest of the chapter giving a history of Einstein's ideas because they raised the questions that physics has been trying to answer every since his early work.