I should teach the world about Albert Einstein's two postulates of special relativity - that the laws of physics take the same form in all inertial frames; and that in any inertial frame, the velocity of light - c - is the same, whether the light is emitted by a body at rest, or by a body in uniform motion.

It is tempting, at the very moment that the world's eyes are on Einstein and his legacy, to wish that people really understood at least one of his famous discoveries. The ability to understand the concept of relativity, as expressed in Einstein's work on special relativity, is of profound importance. That the speed of light is constant, for any observer; and that the concepts of space and time change in accordance with your perspective, depending upon your inertial frame of reference; are things that few know, and that still fewer grasp the significance of.

These concepts are harder to fathom, once we learn that Einstein did not write the mathematics. His use of the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz's transformations, that describe time dilation and length contraction, was not new. But Einstein derived these transformations in a different and more profound way. His brilliance was to believe in the laws of nature, as universal laws of nature. His profound belief in the objectivity of nature, and in the concept that the laws of nature must be the same for any observer travelling at constant velocity, is what led him to transform our universe - and to give Newtonian mechanics the devastating kick it received in 1905.

Einstein literally turned our universe inside out. He made it impossible to ask 'where?' and 'when?', without seriously challenging our perceptions. For Einstein, an observer moving relative to us, at close to the speed of light, would get a different answer to the same questions.

One thing, above all else, remains from Einstein's legacy - a belief in the objectivity of the laws of nature. Of course, this is not solely his to give. As with Isaac Newton before him, Einstein too stood on the shoulders of giants. But since the early days of the Renaissance - and Francis Bacon's development of the method of induction, which allowed Galileo Galilei to develop the principles of scientific experimentation, and from which Newton could put forward universal laws of nature - the forward motion of scientific progress has given us the bedrock from which to view the universe. The genius of Einstein was to actually believe in what amounts to a very human pursuit - the search for the fundamental laws of nature.

Of course, a modern social thinker might dispense with the laws of nature, as a philosophical sleight of hand. After all, if you set out to find the laws of nature, then that is what you will find. If you do not believe in the laws of nature, then you will not find them of any use in explaining the world around you. But the whole project of science is expressed simply by the quest to discover the fundamental laws which govern the behaviour of matter, at its most basic constituent level.

When Einstein produced his paper on special relativity, it was founded upon his belief in the validity of the scientific project, to understand the universe in which we live. It is this belief in the power of humanity, to understand the universe around us, that inspired his quantum leap forward in our knowledge of space and time - expressed in special relativity, and later expressed in general relativity. It is also his legacy that continues to inspire the quest for the theory of everything, the grand unified field theory, and the search for the ultimate constituents of matter. We would do well not to let go of his vision too soon.

If there is a warning underlying the celebration of Einstein's work, it is that we live in an age where science suffers from accusations that it is responsible for some of humanity's worst excesses, and from exaggerated claims for the power of science to explain everything about our condition. Science is only the pursuit of an explanation for the laws of nature, and the fundamental constituents of matter. To ask of science any more than this, is to confuse it with something else, and in the process to reject it as a failed project.

Science has inspired more and more of our technological breakthroughs in the past 100 years, and has proven itself again and again as a power for progress. Without science, we face a bleak and uncertain future, in which progress itself may become a thing of the past. Science is both an inspiration to, and a power for, social change. In an age where progress is largely seen negatively, we could do no better than revisit Einstein's belief in the scientific project, and his belief in the power of humanity to understand the universe.

David Perks is a contributor to The RoutledgeFalmer Guide to Key Debates in Education (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)).