facts about Albert Einstein, perhaps the most well-known scientist of the 20th century.
March 14, 1879 in Ulm,
18,1955 in in Princeton, New Jersey
Einstein, German-born American
physicist and Nobel laureate, best known as the creator of the special and general
theories of relativity and for his bold hypothesis concerning the particle nature of
light. He is perhaps the most well-known scientist of the 20th century.
Einstein was born in Ulm on March 14, 1879, and
spent his youth in Munich, where his family owned a small shop that manufactured electric
machinery. He did not talk until the age of three, but even as a youth he showed a
brilliant curiosity about nature and an ability to understand difficult mathematical
concepts. At the age of 12 he taught himself Euclidean geometry.
Einstein hated the dull regimentation and
unimaginative spirit of school in Munich. When repeated business failure led the family to
leave Germany for Milan, Italy, Einstein, who was then 15 years old, used the opportunity
to withdraw from the school. He spent a year with his parents in Milan, and when it became
clear that he would have to make his own way in the world, he finished secondary school in
Arrau, Switzerland, and entered the Swiss National Polytechnic in Zürich. Einstein did
not enjoy the methods of instruction there. He often cut classes and used the time to
study physics on his own or to play his beloved violin. He passed his examinations and
graduated in 1900 by studying the notes of a classmate. His professors did not think
highly of him and would not recommend him for a university position.
For two years Einstein
worked as a tutor and substitute teacher. In 1902 he secured a position as an examiner in
the Swiss patent office in Bern. In 1903 he married Mileva Mariç, who had been his classmate at the polytechnic. They had two sons but eventually
divorced. Einstein later remarried.
Early Scientific Publications
In 1905 Einstein received his doctorate from the University of Zürich for a theoretical
dissertation on the dimensions of molecules, and he also published three theoretical
papers of central importance to the development of 20th-century physics. In the first of
these papers, on Brownian motion, he made significant predictions about the motion of
particles that are randomly distributed in a fluid. These predictions were later confirmed
The second paper, on
the photoelectric effect, contained a revolutionary hypothesis concerning the nature of
light. Einstein not only proposed that under certain circumstances light can be considered
as consisting of particles, but he also hypothesized that the energy carried by any light
particle, called a photon, is proportional to the frequency of the radiation. The formula
for this is E = hu, where E is the energy of the radiation, h is a universal constant
known as Planck's constant, and u is the frequency of the radiation. This
proposalthat the energy contained within a light beam is transferred in individual
units, or quantacontradicted a hundred-year-old tradition of considering light
energy a manifestation of continuous processes. Virtually no one accepted Einstein's
proposal. In fact, when the American physicist Robert Andrews Millikan experimentally
confirmed the theory almost a decade later, he was surprised and somewhat disquieted by
Einstein, whose prime concern was to understand the
nature of electromagnetic radiation, subsequently urged the development of a theory that
would be a fusion of the wave and particle models for light. Again, very few physicists
understood or were sympathetic to these ideas.
Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity
Einstein's third major paper in 1905, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,"
contained what became known as the special theory of relativity. Since the time of the
English mathematician and physicist Sir Isaac Newton, natural philosophers (as physicists
and chemists were known) had been trying to understand the nature of matter and radiation,
and how they interacted in some unified world picture. The position that mechanical laws
are fundamental has become known as the mechanical world view, and the position that
electrical laws are fundamental has become known as the electromagnetic world view.
Neither approach, however, is capable of providing a consistent explanation for the way
radiation (light, for example) and matter interact when viewed from different inertial
frames of reference, that is, an interaction viewed simultaneously by an observer at rest
and an observer moving at uniform speed.
In the spring of 1905, after considering these
problems for ten years, Einstein realized that the crux of the problem lay not in a theory
of matter but in a theory of measurement. At the heart of his special theory of relativity
was the realization that all measurements of time and space depend on judgments as to
whether two distant events occur simultaneously. This led him to develop a theory based on
two postulates: the principle of relativity, that physical laws are the same in all
inertial reference systems, and the principle of the invariance of the speed of light,
that the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant. He was thus able to provide a
consistent and correct description of physical events in different inertial frames of
reference without making special assumptions about the nature of matter or radiation, or
how they interact. Virtually no one understood Einstein's argument.
Early Reactions to Einstein
The difficulty that others had with Einstein's work was not because it was too
mathematically complex or technically obscure; the problem resulted, rather, from
Einstein's beliefs about the nature of good theories and the relationship between
experiment and theory. Although he maintained that the only source of knowledge is
experience, he also believed that scientific theories are the free creations of a finely
tuned physical intuition and that the premises on which theories are based cannot be
connected logically to experiment. A good theory, therefore, is one in which a minimum
number of postulates is required to account for the physical evidence. This sparseness of
postulates, a feature of all Einstein's work, was what made his work so difficult for
colleagues to comprehend, let alone support.
Einstein did have important supporters, however. His
chief early patron was the German physicist Max Planck. Einstein remained at the patent
office for four years after his star began to rise within the physics community. He then
moved rapidly upward in the German-speaking academic world; his first academic appointment
was in 1909 at the University of Zürich. In 1911 he moved to the German-speaking
university at Prague, and in 1912 he returned to the Swiss National Polytechnic in
Zürich. Finally, in 1913, he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
Physics in Berlin.
The General Theory of Relativity
Even before he left the patent office in 1907, Einstein began work on extending and
generalizing the theory of relativity to all coordinate systems. He began by enunciating
the principle of equivalence, a postulate that gravitational fields are equivalent to
accelerations of the frame of reference. For example, people in a moving elevator cannot,
in principle, decide whether the force that acts on them is caused by gravitation or by a
constant acceleration of the elevator. The full general theory of relativity was not
published until 1916. In this theory the interactions of bodies, which heretofore had been
ascribed to gravitational forces, are explained as the influence of bodies on the geometry
of space-time (four-dimensional space, a mathematical abstraction, having the three
dimensions from Euclidean space and time as the fourth dimension).
On the basis of the general theory of relativity,
Einstein accounted for the previously unexplained variations in the orbital motion of the
planets and predicted the bending of starlight in the vicinity of a massive body such as
the sun. The confirmation of this latter phenomenon during an eclipse of the sun in 1919
became a media event, and Einstein's fame spread worldwide.
For the rest of his life Einstein devoted
considerable time to generalizing his theory even more. His last effort, the unified field
theory, which was not entirely successful, was an attempt to understand all physical
interactionsincluding electromagnetic interactions and weak and strong
interactionsin terms of the modification of the geometry of space-time between
Most of Einstein's colleagues felt that these
efforts were misguided. Between 1915 and 1930 the mainstream of physics was in developing
a new conception of the fundamental character of matter, known as quantum theory. This
theory contained the feature of wave-particle duality (light exhibits the properties of a
particle, as well as of a wave) that Einstein had earlier urged as necessary, as well as
the uncertainty principle, which states that precision in measuring processes is limited.
Additionally, it contained a novel rejection, at a fundamental level, of the notion of
strict causality. Einstein, however, would not accept such notions and remained a critic
of these developments until the end of his life. "God," Einstein once said,
"does not play dice with the world."
After 1919, Einstein became internationally renowned. He accrued honors and awards,
including the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921, from various world scientific societies. His
visit to any part of the world became a national event; photographers and reporters
followed him everywhere. While regretting his loss of privacy, Einstein capitalized on his
fame to further his own political and social views.
The two social movements that received his full
support were pacifism and Zionism. During World War I he was one of a handful of German
academics willing to publicly decry Germany's involvement in the war. After the war his
continued public support of pacifist and Zionist goals made him the target of vicious
attacks by anti-Semitic and right-wing elements in Germany. Even his scientific theories
were publicly ridiculed, especially the theory of relativity.
When Hitler came to power, Einstein immediately
decided to leave Germany for the United States. He took a position at the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey. While continuing his efforts on behalf of world
Zionism, Einstein renounced his former pacifist stand in the face of the awesome threat to
humankind posed by the Nazi regime in Germany.
In 1939 Einstein collaborated with several other
physicists in writing a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, pointing out the
possibility of making an atomic bomb and the likelihood that the German government was
embarking on such a course. The letter, which bore only Einstein's signature, helped lend
urgency to efforts in the U.S. to build the atomic bomb, but Einstein himself played no
role in the work and knew nothing about it at the time.
After the war, Einstein was active in the cause of
international disarmament and world government. He continued his active support of Zionism
but declined the offer made by leaders of the state of Israel to become president of that
country. In the U.S. during the late 1940s and early '50s he spoke out on the need for the
nation's intellectuals to make any sacrifice necessary to preserve political freedom.
Einstein died in Princeton on April 18, 1955.
Einstein's efforts in behalf of social causes have
sometimes been viewed as unrealistic. In fact, his proposals were always carefully thought
out. Like his scientific theories, they were motivated by sound intuition based on a
shrewd and careful assessment of evidence and observation. Although Einstein gave much of
himself to political and social causes, science always came first, because, he often said,
only the discovery of the nature of the universe would have lasting meaning. His writings
include Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1916); About Zionism (1931); Builders
of the Universe (1932); Why War? (1933), with Sigmund Freud; The World as I See It (1934);
The Evolution of Physics (1938), with the Polish physicist Leopold Infeld; and Out of My
Later Years (1950). Einstein's collected papers are being published in a multivolume work,
beginning in 1987.
TO LEARN MORE
from The Great Idea Finder
ON THE BOOKSHELF:
Einstein: A Biography
by Albrecht Folsing / Paperback - 928 pages / Penguin USA - 1998
As long as readers care about Einstein's character as well as his formulas, this book will
attract and deserve attention.
by Alan P. Lightman / Paperback - 179 page / Warner Books - Reprint edition (1994)
An imaginary re-creation of Einstein's discovery of the nature of time, this novel takes
us through the young patent clerk's many dreams depicting compelling conceptions of time.
Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher and Man Portrayed
Through His Own Words
by Albert Einstein / Hardcover / Outlet - Reprint edition (1993)
Out of my Later Years is a collection of Einstein's speeches and articles covering not
just physics but his thoughts on the social condition of man, of Jews, and of war.
Ideas and Opinions
by Albert Einstein, Carl Seelig / Paperback - 377 pages / Crown Pub. - Reprint edition
The most definitive collection of Albert Einstein's popular writings, gathered under the
supervision of Einstein himself. The selections range from his earliest days as a
theoretical physicist to his death in 1955; from such subjects as relativity, nuclear war
or peace, and religion.
Einstein's Unfinished Revolution
by P. C. W. Davies / Paperback / Touchstone Books - 1996
Ever since Einstein overthrew the Newtonian concept of time as a rigid entity, flowing
past us in constant, measurable units, physicists like Davies have molded the fantastic,
warpable space time into speculative theories about the origin, direction, and end of
Einstein: Albert Einstein
DVD / 1 Volume Set / 50 Minutes / Bipgraphy Channel / Less than $25.00 /
Albert Einstein changed the way we think of the universe. But he first
formulated some of his most influential theories when working as a clerk
at the Swiss patent office. From his rocky educational career to his
towering legacy, examines every step of Albert Einstein's extraordinary
NOVA: Einstein's Big Idea
DVD / PBS / 112 Minutes on 1 Disc / Item no:
NOVA441 / Less than $19.95
Everyone's heard of it, but what does E=mc2, the world's most famous equation,
really mean? And why did it change the world? An accessible, suspenseful epic,
Einstein's Big Idea reveals the roots of his astonishing breakthrough in the
human stories of men and women whose innovative thinking across four centuries
helped lead to E=mc2, and ultimately unleashed the power of the atom.
ON THE WEB:
Albert Einstein's Contributions
This site is possibly the best of many sites devoted to Albert Einstein.
From The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition.
From the Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia.
Albert Einstein Online
This site has been UK Online's site of the week, National Academy of the
Sciences cool science site of the day; it's received the Médaille d'Or,
the OMNI Magazine Omnivision Winner, the Dr Matrix Science Award, and
Great Books Five Star Site.
Image and Impact exhibit presented by the American Institute of Physics
This is the companion Web site to the NOVA program "Einstein Revealed,"
broadcast on September 21, 1999. This two-hour special presents a penetrating profile of
Albert Einstein, who contributed more than any other scientist to our modern vision of
Person of the
Albert Einstein chosen Person of the Century by Time magazine.
WORDS OF WISDOM:
"The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Curiosity has its own reasons for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he
contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It
is enough if one tries to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy
curiosity." - Albert Einstein
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- Albert Einstein
"If A equals success, then the formula is: A = X + Y + Z. X is work. Y
is play. Z is keep your mouth shut." - Albert Einstein
DID YOU KNOW?:
- Einstein requested Swiss citizenship in 1901 and took a post
with the Swiss patent office.
- Fear of Nazi expansion caused him to sign a letter to
President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 urging America to develop an atomic bomb. Einstein
himself took no part in the bombs construction.
- In 1940 Einstein became an American citizen.
- A shy and gentle man, he was an accomplished violinist
- He made the world smirk when he once made an error while
helping a young student with math homework.
- He is recognized as one of the greatest physicists of all
- Einstein is also known for his contributions to the
development of the quantum, space-time continuum, theory.
- Einsteins manuscripts and correspondence are presently
at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Sources in BOLD Type
October 9, 2006.
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CELEBRATE WITH US
Person of the
He was the iconic 20th century scientist, the bumbling professor with the German accent.
Yet he was unfathomably profound the genius among geniuses who discovered, merely
by thinking about it, that the universe was not as it seemed.