Re: Who is the father of modern physics

Dear Sobin,

You've asked a very tricky question! What do you mean by the "father"? There were a great 
many people who did work that built on the work of those before them, it's very hard to say 
who really started it all. Einstein's work on the photoelectric effect, various players' work on 
quantum mechanics, etc. However, I think I'd point to James Clerk Maxwell, who did some 
magnificent work on combining electricity and magnetism. It was his work that led others to 
question a variety of physical phenonomen, and that led Einstein to think about the speed of 
light as a constant.

One could also point to Max Plank for his work on the ultraviolet catastrophe. He was the 
one who suggested that energy was quantized, or that there was a smallest discrete chunk 
of energy. 

You can read more about this in any modern physics book. I used A book by Kenneth Krane 
(called Modern Physics) but it is a bit dated now. A simple book is "conceptual physics" by 
Hewitt.