Einstein’s many contributions to physics include his special theory of relativity, which reconciled mechanics with electromagnetism, and his general theory of relativity which extended the principle of relativity to non-uniform motion, creating a new theory of gravitation. His other contributions include relativistic cosmology, capillary action, critical opalescence, classical problems of statistical mechanics and their application to quantum theory, an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules, atomic transition probabilities, the quantum theory of a monatomic gas, thermal properties of light with low radiation density (which laid the foundation for the photon theory), a theory of radiation including stimulated emission, the conception of a unified field theory, and the geometrization of physics.
Works by Albert Einstein include more than fifty scientific papers but also non-scientific works, including About Zionism: Speeches and Lectures by Professor Albert Einstein. (1930), “Why War?” (1933, co-authored by Sigmund Freud), The World As I See It (1934), Out of My Later Years (1950), and a book on science for the general reader, The Evolution of Physics (1938, co-authored by Leopold Infeld).[2]
In 1999 Einstein was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Century”, and a poll of prominent physicists named him the greatest physicist of all time.[3] In popular culture the name “Einstein” has become synonymous with genius.Contents [hide]
Youth and schooling
Young Albert before the Einsteins moved from Germany to Italy.
Albert Einstein was born into a Jewish family in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany. His father was Hermann Einstein, a salesman. His mother was Pauline Einstein, (née Koch).
Although Albert had early speech difficulties, he was a top student in elementary school (Rosenkranz 2005, p. 29).[4]
In 1880, the family moved to Munich, where his father and his uncle founded a company, Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, that manufactured electrical equipment, providing the first lighting for the Oktoberfest and cabling for the Munich suburb of Schwabing. The Einsteins were not observant, and Albert attended a Catholic elementary school. At his mother’s insistence, he took violin lessons, and although he disliked them and eventually quit, he would later take great pleasure in Mozart’s violin sonatas.
When Albert was five, his father showed him a pocket compass. Albert realized that something in empty space was moving the needle and later stated that this experience made “a deep and lasting impression”.[5] As he grew, Albert built models and mechanical devices for fun, and began to show a talent for mathematics.
In 1889, a family friend named Max Talmud (later: Talmey), a medical student,[6] introduced the ten-year-old Albert to key science and philosophy texts, including Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Euclid’s Elements (Einstein called it the “holy little geometry book”).[6] From Euclid, Albert began to understand deductive reasoning (integral to theoretical physics), and by the age of twelve, he learned Euclidean geometry from a school booklet. He soon began to investigate calculus.
In his early teens, Albert attended the new and progressive Luitpold Gymnasium. His father intended for him to pursue electrical engineering, but Albert clashed with authorities and resented the school regimen. He later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in strict rote learning.
In 1894, when Einstein was fifteen, his father’s business failed and the Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan and then, after a few months, to Pavia. During this time, Albert wrote his first “scientific work”, “The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields”.[7] Albert had been left behind in Munich to finish high school, but in the spring of 1895, he withdrew to join his family in Pavia, convincing the school to let him go by using a doctor’s note.
Rather than completing high school Albert decided to apply directly to the ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. Without a school certificate, he was required to take an entrance examination. He did not pass. Einstein wrote that it was in that same year, at age 16, that he first performed his famous thought experiment, visualizing traveling alongside a beam of light.[citation needed]
The Einsteins sent Albert to Aarau, Switzerland to finish secondary school. While lodging with the family of Professor Jost Winteler, he fell in love with the family’s daughter, Sofia Marie-Jeanne Amanda Winteler, called “Marie”. (Albert’s sister, Maja, his confidant, later married Paul Winteler.)[8] In Aarau, Albert studied Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory. In 1896, he graduated at age 17, renounced his German citizenship to avoid military service (with his father’s approval), and finally enrolled in the mathematics program at ETH. On February 21, 1901, he gained Swiss citizenship, which he never revoked.[9] Marie moved to Olsberg, Switzerland for a teaching post.
In 1896, Mileva Marić also enrolled at ETH, the only woman studying mathematics. During the next few years, Einstein and Marić’s friendship developed into romance. Einstein’s mother objected because she thought Marić too old, not Jewish and “physically defective”.[10] Einstein and Marić had a daughter, Lieserl Einstein, born in early 1902.[11] Her fate is unknown.
In 1900, Einstein’s friend Michele Besso introduced him to the work of Ernst Mach. The next year, Einstein published a paper in the prestigious Annalen der Physik on the capillary forces of a straw (Einstein 1901). He graduated from ETH with a teaching diploma.[citation needed]
The patent office
The ‘Einsteinhaus’ in Bern where Einstein lived with Mileva on the First floor during his Annus Mirabilis
After graduation, Einstein could not find a teaching post. After almost two years of searching, a former classmate’s father helped him get a job in Bern, at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property,[12] the patent office, as an assistant examiner. His responsibility was evaluating patent applications for electromagnetic devices. He learned to discern the essence of applications despite applicants’ sometimes poor descriptions, and the director taught him “to express [him]self correctly”.[citation needed] Einstein occasionally corrected design errors while evaluating patent applications. In 1903, Einstein’s position at the Swiss Patent Office was made permanent, although he was passed over for promotion until he “fully mastered machine technology”.
Einstein’s college friend, Michele Besso, also worked at the patent office. With friends they met in Bern, they formed a weekly discussion club on science and philosophy, jokingly named “The Olympia Academy”. Their readings included Poincaré, Mach and Hume, who influenced Einstein’s scientific and philosophical outlook.
While this period at the patent office has often been cited as a waste of Einstein’s talents,[15] or as a temporary job with no connection to his interests in physics,[16] the historian of science Peter Galison has argued that Einstein’s work there was connected to his later interests. Much of that work related to questions about transmission of electric signals and electrical-mechanical synchronization of time: two technical problems of the day that show up conspicuously in the thought experiments that led Einstein to his radical conclusions about the nature of light and the fundamental connection between space and time.[13][14]
Einstein married Mileva Marić on January 6, 1903, and their relationship was, for a time, a personal and intellectual partnership. In a letter to her, Einstein wrote of Mileva as “a creature who is my equal and who is as strong and independent as I am.”[17] There has been debate about whether Marić influenced Einstein’s work; most historians do not think she made major contributions, however.[18][19][20] On May 14, 1904, Albert and Mileva’s first son, Hans Albert Einstein, was born. Their second son, Eduard Einstein, was born on July 28, 1910.
Bose–Einstein statistics
In 1924, Einstein received a statistical model from Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose which showed that light could be understood as a gas. Bose’s statistics applied to some atoms as well as to the proposed light particles, and Einstein published an article in the Zeitschrift für Physik describing Bose’s model and its implications, among them the Bose–Einstein condensate phenomenon that should appear at very low temperatures.[citation needed] It wasn’t until 1995 that the first such condensate was produced experimentally by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman using ultra-cooling equipment built at the NIST-JILA laboratory at the University of Colorado at Boulder.[citation needed] Bose–Einstein statistics are now used to describe the behaviors of any assembly of “bosons”.[citation needed] Einstein’s sketches for this project may be seen in the Einstein Archive in the library of the Leiden University (Instituut-Lorentz 2005).
Boltzmann distribution
Einstein worked with Erwin Schrödinger on a refinement of the Boltzmann distribution, a mixed classical and quantum mechanical gas model, although he declined to have his name included on the paper.[citation needed]
The Einstein refrigerator
In 1926, Einstein and his former student Leó Szilárd, a Hungarian physicist who later worked on the Manhattan Project and is credited with the discovery of the chain reaction, co-invented (and in 1930, patented) the Einstein refrigerator, revolutionary for having no moving parts and using only heat, not ice, as an input (Goettling 1998).[27]
Einstein and Niels Bohr. Photo taken by Paul Ehrenfest during their visit to Leiden in December 1925.
Bohr vs. Einstein
As quantum theory extended to quantum mechanics, Einstein began to object to the Copenhagen Interpretation developed by physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. The public debate between Einstein and Bohr lasted for years. In a 1926 letter to Max Born, Einstein wrote: “I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.” (Einstein 1969)[28] Bohr told Born to tell Einstein: “Stop telling God what to do.”[citation needed]
Einstein’s disagreement with Bohr revolved around scientific determinism. Although Bohr rebutted all of Einstein’s specific arguments against the prevailing interpretation of quantum theory, Einstein was never satisfied by its intrinsically incomplete description of nature. In 1935, he collaborated with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen on further exploration of his concerns, which became known as the EPR paradox.[citation needed]
Death
Albert Einstein laughing with Israeli diplomat, Abba Eban (left), 1952
On April 17, 1955, Albert Einstein experienced internal bleeding caused by the rupture of an aortic aneurism[39]. He took a draft of a speech he was preparing for a television appearance commemorating the State of Israel’s seventh anniversary with him to the hospital, but he did not live long enough to complete it. (Albert Einstein Archives 1955) He died in Princeton Hospital early the next morning at the age of 76, leaving his generalized theory of gravitation incomplete. Einstein’s remains were cremated and his ashes were scattered (O’Connor & Robertson 1997).
Before the cremation, Princeton Hospital pathologist Thomas Stoltz Harvey removed Einstein’s brain for preservation, in hope that the neuroscience of the future would be able to discover what made Einstein so intelligent.
While travelling, Einstein had written daily to his wife Elsa and adopted stepdaughters, Margot and Ilse, and the letters were included in the papers bequeathed to The Hebrew University. Margot Einstein permitted the personal letters to be made available to the public, but requested that it not be done until twenty years after her death. Barbara Wolff, of the The Hebrew University’s Albert Einstein Archives, told the BBC that there are about 3,500 pages of private correspondence written between 1912 and 1955 (BBC 2006).
The United States’ National Academy of Sciences commissioned the Albert Einstein Memorial, a monumental bronze and marble sculpture by Robert Berks, erected at its Washington, D.C. campus adjacent to the National Mall.[citation needed]
Einstein bequeathed the royalties from use of his image to The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Roger Richman Agency licences the use of his name and associated imagery, as agent for the Hebrew University. (Roger Richman Agency 2007)
Honors
A 5 Israeli pound note from 1968 with the portrait of Einstein.
Albert Einstein, Person of the Century
In 1999, Albert Einstein was named “Person of the Century” by Time magazine (Golden 2000), the Gallup Poll recorded him as the fourth most admired person of the 20th century[citation needed] and according to The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History, Einstein is “the greatest scientist of the twentieth century and one of the supreme intellects of all time” (Hart 1978).
A partial list of his memorials:
The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics named 2005 the “World Year of Physics” in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the publication of the Annus Mirabilis Papers.
The Albert Einstein Memorial by Robert Berks
A unit used in photochemistry, the einstein
The chemical element 99, einsteinium
The asteroid 2001 Einstein
The Albert Einstein Award
The Albert Einstein Peace Prize
Einstein in popular culture
Albert Einstein, 1951. Arthur Sasse, photographer
On Einstein’s 72nd birthday in 1951, UPI photographer Arthur Sasse was trying to persuade him to smile for the camera, but having smiled for photographers many times that day, Einstein stuck out his tongue instead (Kupper 2000).
Australian film maker Yahoo Serious used the birthday photograph as inspiration for his movie Young Einstein,[citation needed] indeed, Albert Einstein has been the subject of or inspiration for many novels, films and plays. For a sample of them, see Jean-Claude Carrier’s 2005 French novel, Einstein S’il Vous Plait (”Please, Mr Einstein”), Nicolas Roeg’s film Insignificance, Fred Schepisi’s film I.Q. (where he was portrayed by Walter Matthau), Alan Lightman’s collection of short stories Einstein’s Dreams, and Steve Martin’s comedic play Picasso at the Lapin Agile. He was the subject of Philip Glass’s groundbreaking 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach and his humorous side is the subject of Ed Metzger’s one-man play Albert Einstein: The Practical Bohemian.
Einstein is a favorite model for depictions of mad scientists and absent-minded professors; his expressive face and distinctive hairstyle have been widely copied and exaggerated. Time magazine’s Frederic Golden wrote that Einstein was “a cartoonist’s dream come true.” (Golden 2000)
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