Albert Einstein is perhaps the most amazing scientific mind the world has ever seen. Few people (with the exception of Newton, Hawking, etc.) in the history of the world compare to his superior genius. Albert Einstein not only changed the scientific community forever, but changed every-day life as we know it.
Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany in March 14, 1879. He had a troubled childhood as most people know. From the time he was very young, he had a deep seeded interest in math and science. At times, he got so board with his schoolwork he stopped doing it and consequently failed math. Einstein’s mathematics professor, Hermann Minkowski, got so angered with Albert’s lack of interest in the class; he called Einstein a “lazy dog.” From the time he was very young till his death, he would only study what he wanted to. When Einstein was in college, he often got upset because the Physics Professors only covered the “Old Physics” and Einstein wanted to learn about the “New Physics.”
Einstein’s life after college was nothing to brag about either. He passed his math and physics examinations with flying colors but could not find a job. He applied to many different jobs, but it seemed like no matter what he did he could not land one. His family was also getting worried about him. On April 19, 1901, Einstein’s father, Hermann Einstein, wrote a letter Professor Wilhelm Ostwald at the University of Leipzig, telling the Professor that Einstein was an outstanding man who would be a great asset. Einstein was looking for an Assistant position, which would allow him to continue his studies in theoretical and experimental physics. The letter did nothing. And Einstein went jobless for over eight months after graduating from the Zurich Politechnikum. Then in June 1902, Einstein got a job at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern with the title of “Technical expert third class.”
Einstein first big break came when he got published in the very popular journal “Annalen der Physik.” This was still before he discovered Relativity.
What Einstein did next would be the biggest scientific break in recent history: Instead of accepting the Newtonian laws of physics like everyone else did, Einstein went against the grain and totally dismissed the “Old Physics.” He envisioned a world where space and time are relative and the speed of light is absolute (at the time, it was believed that space and time were absolute and the speed of light was relative). And he was right. He then wrote a paper called “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” which was published in the Annalen der Physik. The paper was later given the name “Special Relativity.” It was published June 30, 1905. Einstein awaited criticism and controversy from the paper but received little to none. This was a huge surprise to Einstein because he had totally rewritten the basic laws of physics that Newton founded. After a long wait, Einstein received a letter from the leading Physicist at the time Max Planck. The great Physicist wanted some clarification on some of the topics in Special Relativity. Einstein was overjoyed at this reply.
Einstein later published another paper in 1915 called “General Relativity.” General Relativity took over when Special Relativity started to fail.
Controversy started to rise when Einstein released his second paper called “General Relativity.” The controversy was so great that in 1922 when he received his Nobel Prize in physics, it was explicitly stated that the award was not for the Special and General theories. The controversy died down in the late 20′s and early 30′s when technology was evolved enough to prove Relativity true.
Einstein’s started to phase out of the physics community during the late 30′s early 40′s. Einstein died April 18, 1955.
• He was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm Germany to his parents Hermann and Pauline.
• Einstein had problems with school which led him to be kicked out.
• In 1900, Einstein graduated and went unemployed for eight months having off and on jobs as a high school teacher.
• June 30, 1905 Einstein published his breakthrough paper “Special Relativity.”
• In 1908, Einstein became a lecturer at the University of Bern.
• In 1909, he became a professor of physics at the University of Zurich.
• Also in 1909, Einstein is reconized as the leading scientific thinker.
• In 1911, he became a professor at the Karl-Ferdinand University.
• In 1912 Einstein began working on what would be his second big breakthrough.
• Then in 1915, he published “General Relativity.”
• In 1922, Einstein recieved the most prestigious science award: The Nobel Prize in Physics for the work he had done on the Photoelectric Effect. It was not for relativity!
• On Augest 2, 1939, Albert Einstein wrote FDR a letter explaning the possible destructive power of a atomic bomb. FDR took it seriously, and, in turn, started the Manhattan Project.
• In 1940, Einstein became citizen of the United States.
• Einstein spent the later years of his life searching for a theory called the “Grand Unified Theory.” He never found it, and still to this day it remains a mystery.
• Einstein died April 18, 1955
Around 1886 Albert Einstein began his school career in Munich. As well as his violin lessons, which he had from age six to age thirteen, he also had religious education at home where he was taught Judaism. Two years later he entered the Luitpold Gymnasium and after this his religious education was given at school. He studied mathematics, in particular the calculus, beginning around 1891.
In 1894 Einstein’s family moved to Milan but Einstein remained in Munich. In 1895 Einstein failed an examination that would have allowed him to study for a diploma as an electrical engineer at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich. Einstein renounced German citizenship in 1896 and was to be stateless for a number of years. He did not even apply for Swiss citizenship until 1899, citizenship being granted in 1901.
Following the failing of the entrance exam to the ETH, Einstein attended secondary school at Aarau planning to use this route to enter the ETH in Zurich. While at Aarau he wrote an essay (for which was only given a little above half marks!) in which he wrote of his plans for the future, see [13]:-
If I were to have the good fortune to pass my examinations, I would go to Zurich. I would stay there for four years in order to study mathematics and physics. I imagine myself becoming a teacher in those branches of the natural sciences, choosing the theoretical part of them. Here are the reasons which lead me to this plan. Above all, it is my disposition for abstract and mathematical thought, and my lack of imagination and practical ability.
Indeed Einstein succeeded with his plan graduating in 1900 as a teacher of mathematics and physics. One of his friends at ETH was Marcel Grossmann who was in the same class as Einstein. Einstein tried to obtain a post, writing to Hurwitz who held out some hope of a position but nothing came of it. Three of Einstein’s fellow students, including Grossmann, were appointed assistants at ETH in Zurich but clearly Einstein had not impressed enough and still in 1901 he was writing round universities in the hope of obtaining a job, but without success.
He did manage to avoid Swiss military service on the grounds that he had flat feet and varicose veins. By mid 1901 he had a temporary job as a teacher, teaching mathematics at the Technical High School in Winterthur. Around this time he wrote:-
I have given up the ambition to get to a university …
Another temporary position teaching in a private school in Schaffhausen followed. Then Grossmann’s father tried to help Einstein get a job by recommending him to the director of the patent office in Bern. Einstein was appointed as a technical expert third class.
Einstein worked in this patent office from 1902 to 1909, holding a temporary post when he was first appointed, but by 1904 the position was made permanent and in 1906 he was promoted to technical expert second class. While in the Bern patent office he completed an astonishing range of theoretical physics publications, written in his spare time without the benefit of close contact with scientific literature or colleagues.
Einstein earned a doctorate from the University of Zurich in 1905 for a thesis On a new determination of molecular dimensions. He dedicated the thesis to Grossmann.
In the first of three papers, all written in 1905, Einstein examined the phenomenon discovered by Max Planck, according to which electromagnetic energy seemed to be emitted from radiating objects in discrete quantities. The energy of these quanta was directly proportional to the frequency of the radiation. This seemed to contradict classical electromagnetic theory, based on Maxwell’s equations and the laws of thermodynamics which assumed that electromagnetic energy consisted of waves which could contain any small amount of energy. Einstein used Planck’s quantum hypothesis to describe the electromagnetic radiation of light.
Einstein’s second 1905 paper proposed what is today called the special theory of relativity. He based his new theory on a reinterpretation of the classical principle of relativity, namely that the laws of physics had to have the same form in any frame of reference. As a second fundamental hypothesis, Einstein assumed that the speed of light remained constant in all frames of reference, as required by Maxwell’s theory.
Later in 1905 Einstein showed how mass and energy were equivalent. Einstein was not the first to propose all the components of special theory of relativity. His contribution is unifying important parts of classical mechanics and Maxwell’s electrodynamics.
The third of Einstein’s papers of 1905 concerned statistical mechanics, a field of that had been studied by Ludwig Boltzmann and Josiah Gibbs.
After 1905 Einstein continued working in the areas described above. He made important contributions to quantum theory, but he sought to extend the special theory of relativity to phenomena involving acceleration. The key appeared in 1907 with the principle of equivalence, in which gravitational acceleration was held to be indistinguishable from acceleration caused by mechanical forces. Gravitational mass was therefore identical with inertial mass.
In 1908 Einstein became a lecturer at the University of Bern after submitting his Habilitation thesis Consequences for the constitution of radiation following from the energy distribution law of black bodies. The following year he become professor of physics at the University of Zurich, having resigned his lectureship at Bern and his job in the patent office in Bern.
By 1909 Einstein was recognised as a leading scientific thinker and in that year he resigned from the patent office. He was appointed a full professor at the Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague in 1911. In fact 1911 was a very significant year for Einstein since he was able to make preliminary predictions about how a ray of light from a distant star, passing near the Sun, would appear to be bent slightly, in the direction of the Sun. This would be highly significant as it would lead to the first experimental evidence in favour of Einstein’s theory.
About 1912, Einstein began a new phase of his gravitational research, with the help of his mathematician friend Marcel Grossmann, by expressing his work in terms of the tensor calculus of Tullio Levi-Civita and Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro. Einstein called his new work the general theory of relativity. He moved from Prague to Zurich in 1912 to take up a chair at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich.
Einstein returned to Germany in 1914 but did not reapply for German citizenship. What he accepted was an impressive offer. It was a research position in the Prussian Academy of Sciences together with a chair (but no teaching duties) at the University of Berlin. He was also offered the directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin which was about to be established.
After a number of false starts Einstein published, late in 1915, the definitive version of general theory. Just before publishing this work he lectured on general relativity at Göttingen and he wrote:-
To my great joy, I completely succeeded in convincing Hilbert and Klein.
In fact Hilbert submitted for publication, a week before Einstein completed his work, a paper which contains the correct field equations of general relativity.
When British eclipse expeditions in 1919 confirmed his predictions, Einstein was idolised by the popular press. The London Times ran the headline on 7 November 1919:-
Revolution in science – New theory of the Universe – Newtonian ideas overthrown.
In 1920 Einstein’s lectures in Berlin were disrupted by demonstrations which, although officially denied, were almost certainly anti-Jewish. Certainly there were strong feelings expressed against his works during this period which Einstein replied to in the press quoting Lorentz, Planck and Eddington as supporting his theories and stating that certain Germans would have attacked them if he had been:-
… a German national with or without swastika instead of a Jew with liberal international convictions…
During 1921 Einstein made his first visit to the United States. His main reason was to raise funds for the planned Hebrew University of Jerusalem. However he received the Barnard Medal during his visit and lectured several times on relativity. He is reported to have commented to the chairman at the lecture he gave in a large hall at Princeton which was overflowing with people:-
I never realised that so many Americans were interested in tensor analysis.
Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921 but not for relativity rather for his 1905 work on the photoelectric effect. In fact he was not present in December 1922 to receive the prize being on a voyage to Japan. Around this time he made many international visits. He had visited Paris earlier in 1922 and during 1923 he visited Palestine. After making his last major scientific discovery on the association of waves with matter in 1924 he made further visits in 1925, this time to South America.
Among further honours which Einstein received were the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1925 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1926.
Niels Bohr and Einstein were to carry on a debate on quantum theory which began at the Solvay Conference in 1927. Planck, Niels Bohr, de Broglie, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Dirac were at this conference, in addition to Einstein. Einstein had declined to give a paper at the conference and:-
… said hardly anything beyond presenting a very simple objection to the probability interpretation …. Then he fell back into silence …
Indeed Einstein’s life had been hectic and he was to pay the price in 1928 with a physical collapse brought on through overwork. However he made a full recovery despite having to take things easy throughout 1928.
By 1930 he was making international visits again, back to the United States. A third visit to the United States in 1932 was followed by the offer of a post at Princeton. The idea was that Einstein would spend seven months a year in Berlin, five months at Princeton. Einstein accepted and left Germany in December 1932 for the United States. The following month the Nazis came to power in Germany and Einstein was never to return there.
During 1933 Einstein travelled in Europe visiting Oxford, Glasgow, Brussels and Zurich. Offers of academic posts which he had found it so hard to get in 1901, were plentiful. He received offers from Jerusalem, Leiden, Oxford, Madrid and Paris.
What was intended only as a visit became a permanent arrangement by 1935 when he applied and was granted permanent residency in the United States. At Princeton his work attempted to unify the laws of physics. However he was attempting problems of great depth and he wrote:-
I have locked myself into quite hopeless scientific problems – the more so since, as an elderly man, I have remained estranged from the society here…
In 1940 Einstein became a citizen of the United States, but chose to retain his Swiss citizenship. He made many contributions to peace during his life. In 1944 he made a contribution to the war effort by hand writing his 1905 paper on special relativity and putting it up for auction. It raised six million dollars, the manuscript today being in the Library of Congress.
By 1949 Einstein was unwell. A spell in hospital helped him recover but he began to prepare for death by drawing up his will in 1950. He left his scientific papers to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a university which he had raised funds for on his first visit to the USA, served as a governor of the university from 1925 to 1928 but he had turned down the offer of a post in 1933 as he was very critical of its administration.
One more major event was to take place in his life. After the death of the first president of Israel in 1952, the Israeli government decided to offer the post of second president to Einstein. He refused but found the offer an embarrassment since it was hard for him to refuse without causing offence.
One week before his death Einstein signed his last letter. It was a letter to Bertrand Russell in which he agreed that his name should go on a manifesto urging all nations to give up nuclear weapons. It is fitting that one of his last acts was to argue, as he had done all his life, for international peace.
Einstein was cremated at Trenton, New Jersey at 4 pm on 18 April 1955 (the day of his death). His ashes were scattered at an undisclosed place.
Pictures of Albert Einstein
Drawing by Iutta Waloschek.
Further pictures of Albert Einstein
With his wife Mileva and first son Hans Albert in 1904
Becoming an American citizen in 1940 with his secretary Dukas and stepdaughter Margot
Visiting the USA in 1921 with his second wife Elsa
A larger copy of this USA stamp is at this link.
On a Ghanaian stamp
A larger copy of this Israeli banknote is at this link.
Albert Einstein, 1879 – 1955
Albert Einstein, a German-American physists, gave so much to this country. 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 died in Princeton, April 18, 1955.
When repeated business failure led the family to leave Germany for Milan, Italy, Einstein, who was then 15 years old, withdrew from the schools of Munich. He stayed a year with his parents in Milan ,then left to finish secondary school in Arrau, Switzerland, and entered the Swiss National Polytechnic in Zürich .Again the schools here didn’t satisfy Einstein. He often cut classes and used the time to study physics on his own or to play violin. He graduated in 1900 but his professors disliked him and wouldn’t recommend him for a position in the University.
For two years Einstein was a tutor and substitute teacher but, in 1902 he secured a position as an examiner in a Swiss patent office in Bern. He married Mileva Mariç in 1903, one of his classmates at the polytechnic. They had two sons before getting a divorced. Later, Einstein remarried.
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 important to the development of 20th-century physics. The first of these, on Brownian motion, made significant predictions about the motion of particles that are randomly distributed in a fluid, which were later proved by an experiment. The second paper, on the photoelectric effect, presented a hypothesis on 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 a photon is proportional to the frequency of the radiation. The formula for this hypothesis is stated , E being the energy of the radiation, h being a universal constant known as Planck’s constant,and u being the frequency of the radiation, E=hu .The proposal that the energy contained within a light beam is transferred in individual units,called quanta, contradicted the hundred-year-old belief that light energy was a manifestation of continuous processes. Virtually no one accepted Einstein’s proposal, even Robert Andrews Millikan was surprised when he proved the theory correct.
Einstein’s third major paper finished 1905, ” On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies “, contained what became known as the special theory of relativity. For so long philosophers had been trying to understand the nature of matter and radiation, and how they interacted together. Neither the mechanical world view or the electromagnetic world view was capable of providing a consistent explanation for the way radiation and matter interact when viewed 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 problem lay in a theory of measurement, not in a theory of matter. At the center of this 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 the principle of relativity, that says physical laws are the same in all inertial reference systems, and the principle of the invariance of the speed of light, which states that the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant. He was then able to provide a correct description of physical events in different inertial frames of reference.Again, no one understood Einstein’s argument.
Einstein beleived that a good theory is one in which a minimum number of postulates is required to account for the physical evidence. This sparseness of postulates was what made his work so difficult for colleagues to comprehend, let alone support.However, Einstein did have important supporters. His chief patron was the German physicist Max Planck.After staying at the patent office for four years he moved rapidly upward in the German-speaking academic world. His first academic appointment was in 1909 at the University of Zürich, then in 1911 he moved to the German-speaking university at Prague, and in 1912 he returned to the Swiss National Polytechnic in Zürich. Finally,he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin in 1913.
After 1919, Einstein became internationally renowned. He accrued honors and awards, including the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922, from various world scientific societies.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. Even his scientific theories were publicly ridiculed, especially the theory of relativity. When Hitler came to power, Einstein immediately decided to leave Germany and move to 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 huge threat to humankind posed by the Nazis 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, even though Einstein himself played no role in the work and knew nothing about it .
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. he spoke out on the need for the nation’s leaders 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 careful assessment of evidence and observation. Einstein gave much of himself to political and social causes,but, science always came first, because, he often said, only the discovery of the nature of the universe would have lasting meaning.
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