Albert Einstein had an IQ of 160 and he was best known as the man who gave us E=MC2 theory. He was born March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Germany. He grew up in Munich, where his family owned a 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. Remember, he gave us the e=mc2 or E=MC Squared! No doubt, Albert Einstien was in fact a genius!
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 Zuerich. 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 Meric, who had been his classmate and a mathematician at polytechnic. They had two sons but eventually divorced. Einstein later remarried.
In 1905, Einstein received his doctorate from the University of Zurich for a theoretical dissertation on the dimensions of molecules, and he 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.
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 = h n, where E is the energy of the radiation, h is a universal constant known as Planck's constant , and n is the frequency of the radiation. This proposal-which the energy contained within a light beam, is transferred in individual units or quanta-contradicted 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 Milliken experimentally confirmed the theory almost a decade later, he was surprised and somewhat disquieted by the outcome. 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 third major paper in 1905, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," contained what became known as the special theory of relativity. On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies ", E=mc² (E=mc2). Here E represents energy, m represents mass, and c² is a very large number, the square of the speed of light. "When the Special Theory of Relativity began to germinate in me, I was visited by all sorts of nervous conflicts... I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion." Concerning previous experiments that had yet to be understood his work provided an explanation of the unexpected result through a new analysis of space and time. The position that mechanical laws are fundamental has become known as the mechanical worldview, and the position that electrical laws are fundamental has become known as the electromagnetic worldview. 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.
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 Zurich. In 1911, he moved to the German-speaking University at Prague, and in 1912, he returned to the Swiss National Polytechnic in Zurich. Finally, in 1913, he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin.
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).
Because 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 near 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 interactions-including electromagnetic interactions and weak and strong interactions-in terms of the modification of the geometry of space-time between interacting entities.
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 1922, 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 U.S. He took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J. 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.
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