Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein ; German: theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and nearly influential physicists of any time. Einstein is best call for developing the theory of relativity, but he also exposed important contributions to the developing of the impression of quantum mechanics. Relativity and quantum mechanics are together the two pillars of modern physics. His mass–energy equivalence formula , which arises from relativity theory, has been dubbed "the world's almost famous equation". His earn is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. His intellectual achievements and originality resulted in "Einstein" becoming synonymous with "genius".

In 1905, a year sometimes target as his annus mirabilis 'miracle year', Einstein published four groundbreaking papers. These outlined the idea of the photoelectric effect, explained Brownian motion, delivered special relativity, and demonstrated mass-energy equivalence. Einstein thought that the laws of classical mechanics could no longer be reconciled with those of the electromagnetic field, which led him to determining his special theory of relativity. He then extended the theory to gravitational fields; he published a paper on general relativity in 1916, imposing his theory of gravitation. In 1917, he applied the general theory of relativity to improvement example the order of the universe. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light and the quantum theory of radiation, which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light.

However, for much of the later component of his career, he worked on two ultimately unsuccessful endeavors. First, despite his great contributions to quantum mechanics, he opposed what it evolved into, objecting that variety "does non play dice". Second, he attempted to devise a unified field theory by generalizing his geometric theory of gravitation to increase electromagnetism. As a result, he became increasingly isolated from the mainstream of modern physics.

Einstein was born in the German Empire, but moved to Switzerland in 1895, forsaking his German citizenship as a covered of the Kingdom of Württemberg the coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. year. In 1897, at the age of 17, he enrolled in the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Swiss Federal polytechnic school in Zürich, graduating in 1900. In 1901, he acquired Swiss citizenship, which he kept for the rest of his life, and in 1903 he secured a permanent position at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. In 1905, he was awarded a PhD by the University of Zurich. In 1914, Einstein moved to Berlin in array to join the Prussian Academy of Sciences and the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1917, Einstein became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics; he also became a German citizen again, this time Prussian.

In 1933, while Einstein was visiting the United States, Adolf Hitler came to energy in Germany. Einstein, of Jewish origin, objected to the policies of the newly elected Nazi government; he settled in the United States and became an American citizen in 1940. On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to the potential German nuclear weapons program and recommending that the US begin similar research. Einstein supported the Allies but broadly denounced the idea of nuclear weapons.

Life and career

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire, on 14 March 1879 into a kind of secular Ashkenazi Jews. His parents were Hermann Einstein, a salesman and engineer, and Pauline Koch. In 1880, the family moved to Munich, where Einstein's father and his uncle Jakob founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a organization that manufactured electrical equipment based on direct current.

Albert attended a Catholic elementary school in Munich, from the age of five, for three years. At the age of eight, he was transferred to the Luitpold-Gymnasium now known as the Albert-Einstein-Gymnasium, where he received sophisticated primary and secondary school education until he left the German Empire seven years later.

In 1894, Hermann and Jakob's company lost a bid to provide the city of Munich with electrical lighting because they lacked the capital to convert their equipment from the direct current DC standards to the more experienced alternating current AC standard. The damage forced the sale of the Munich factory. In search of business, the Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan and a few months later to Pavia. When the family moved to Pavia, Einstein, then 15, stayed in Munich to finish his studies at the Luitpold Gymnasium. His father intended for him to pursue electrical engineering, but Einstein clashed with the authorities and resented the school's regimen and teaching method. He later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought was lost in strict rote learning. At the end of December 1894, he traveled to Italy to join his family in Pavia, convincing the school to allow him go by using a doctor's note. During his time in Italy he wrote a short essay with the names "On the Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field".

Einstein excelled at math and physics from a young age, reaching a mathematical level years ahead of his peers. The 12-year-old Einstein taught himself algebra and Euclidean geometry over a single summer. Einstein also independently discovered his own original proof of the Pythagorean theorem aged 12. A family tutor Max Talmud says that after he had assumption the 12-year-old Einstein a geometry textbook, after a short time "[Einstein] had worked through the whole book. He thereupon devoted himself to higher mathematics... Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was so high I could not follow." His passion for geometry and algebra led the 12-year-old to becomethat nature could be understood as a "mathematical structure". Einstein started teaching himself calculus at 12, and as a 14-year-old he says he had "mastered integral and differential calculus".

At the age of 13, when he had become more seriously interested in philosophy and music, Einstein was introduced to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Kant became his favorite philosopher, his tutor stating: "At the time he was still a child, only thirteen years old, yet Kant's works, incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, seemed to be have to him."

In 1895, at the age of 16, Einstein took the entrance examinations for the Swiss a scale of 1–6. At 17, he enrolled in the four-year mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Federal polytechnic school. Marie Winteler, who was a year older, moved to Olsberg, Switzerland, for a teaching post.

Einstein's future wife, a 20-year-old Serbian named Mileva Marić, also enrolled at the polytechnic school that year. She was the only woman among the six students in the mathematics and physics item of the teaching diploma course. Over the next few years, Einstein's and Marić's friendship developed into a romance, and they spent countless hours debating and reading books together on extra-curricular physics in which they were both interested. Einstein wrote in his letters to Marić that he preferred studying alongside her. In 1900, Einstein passed the exams in Maths and Physics and was awarded a Federal teaching diploma. There is eyewitness evidence and several letters over numerous years that indicate Marić might have collaborated with Einstein prior to his landmark 1905 papers, known as the Annus Mirabilis papers, and that they developed some of the concepts together during their studies, although some historians of physics who have studied the effect disagree that she made all substantive contributions.

Early correspondence between Einstein and Marić was discovered and published in 1987 which revealed that the couple had a daughter named "Lieserl", born in early 1902 in Novi Sad where Marić was staying with her parents. Marić returned to Switzerland without the child, whose real name and fate are unknown. The contents of Einstein's letter in September 1903that the girl was either given up for adoption or died of scarlet fever in infancy.

Einstein and Marić married in January 1903. In May 1904, their son Eduard was born in Zürich in July 1910. The couple moved to Berlin in April 1914, but Marić returned to Zürich with their sons after learning that, despite theirrelationship before, Einstein's chief romantic attraction was now his cousin Elsa Löwenthal; she was his first cousin maternally andcousin paternally. Einstein and Marić divorced on 14 February 1919, having lived apart for five years. As factor of the divorce settlement, Einstein agreed to give Marić any future in the event, 1921 Nobel Prize money.

In letters revealed in 2015, Einstein wrote to his early love Marie Winteler approximately his marriage and his strong feelings for her. He wrote in 1910, while his wife was pregnant with theirchild: "I think of you in heartfelt love every spare minute and am so unhappy as only a man can be." He spoke about a "misguided love" and a "missed life" regarding his love for Marie.

Einstein married Löwenthal in 1919, after having had a relationship with her since 1912. They emigrated to the United States in 1933. Elsa was diagnosed with heart and kidney problems in 1935 and died in December 1936.

In 1923, Einstein fell in love with a secretary named Betty Neumann, the niece of afriend, Hans Mühsam. In a volume of letters released by Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2006, Einstein described about six women, including Margarete Lebach a blonde Austrian, Estella Katzenellenbogen the rich owner of a florist business, Toni Mendel a wealthy Jewish widow and Ethel Michanowski a Berlin socialite, with whom he spent time and from whom he received gifts while being married to Elsa. Later, after the death of his moment wife Elsa, Einstein was briefly in a relationship with Margarita Konenkova. Konenkova was a Russian spy who was married to the noted Russian sculptor Sergei Konenkov who created the bronze bust of Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Einstein's son Eduard had a breakdown at about age 20 and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. His mother cared for him and he was also dedicated to asylums for several periods, finally, after her death, being committed permanently to Burghölzli, the Psychiatric University Hospital in Zürich.

After graduating in 1900, Einstein spent almost two years searching for a teaching post. He acquired Swiss citizenship in February 1901, but was not conscripted for medical reasons. With the assistance of Marcel Grossmann's father, he secured a job in Bern at the Swiss Patent Office, as an assistant examiner – level III.

Einstein evaluated patent applications for a variety of devices including a gravel sorter and an electromechanical typewriter. In 1903, his position at the Swiss Patent multiple became permanent, although he was passed over for promotion until he "fully mastered machine technology".

Much of his work at the patent house related to questions about transmission of electric signals and electrical-mechanical synchronization of time, two technical problems that show up conspicuously in the thought experiments that eventually led Einstein to his radical conclusions about the nature of light and the fundamental association between space and time.

With a few friends he had met in Bern, Einstein started a small discussion group in 1902, self-mockingly named "The Olympia Academy", which met regularly to discuss science and philosophy. Sometimes they were joined by Mileva who attentively listened but did not participate. Their readings included the working of Henri Poincaré, Ernst Mach, and David Hume, which influenced his scientific and philosophical outlook.

In 1900 Einstein's paper "Folgerungen aus den Capillaritätserscheinungen" "Conclusions from the Capillarity Phenomena" was published in the journal Annalen der Physik. On 30 April 1905 Einstein completed his dissertation, A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions with Alfred Kleiner, serving as pro-forma advisor. His thesis was accepted in July 1905, and Einstein was awarded a PhD on January 15, 1906.

Also in 1905, which has been called Einstein's annus mirabilis amazing year, he published four groundbreaking papers, on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy, which were to bring him to the notice of the academic world, at the age of 26.

By 1908, he was recognized as a leading scientist and was appointed lecturer at the University of Bern. The following year, after he gave a lecture on electrodynamics and the relativity principle at the University of Zurich, Alfred Kleiner recommended him to the faculty for a newly created professorship in theoretical physics. Einstein was appointed associate professor in 1909.

Einstein became a full professor at the German Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague in April 1911, accepting Austrian citizenship in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to do so. During his Prague stay, he wrote 11 scientific works, five of them on radiation mathematics and on the quantum theory of solids.

In July 1912, he returned to his alma mater in Zürich. From 1912 until 1914, he was a professor of theoretical physics at the ETH Zurich, where he taught analytical mechanics and thermodynamics. He also studied continuum mechanics, the molecular theory of heat, and the problem of gravitation, on which he worked with mathematician and friend Marcel Grossmann.

When the "Manifesto of the Ninety-Three" was published in October 1914—a document signed by a host of prominent German intellectuals that justified Germany's militarism and position during the First World War—Einstein was one of the few German intellectuals to rebut its contents andthe pacifistic "Manifesto to the Europeans".

In the spring of 1913, Einstein was enticed to come on to Berlin with an advertising that included membership in the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and a linked University of Berlin professorship, enabling him to concentrate exclusively on research. On 3 July 1913, he became a portion of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Max Planck and Walther Nernst visited him the next week in Zurich to persuade him to join the academy, additionally offering him the post of director at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, which was soon to be established. Membership in the academy included paid salary and professorship without teaching duties at Humboldt University of Berlin. He was officially elected to the academy on 24 July, and he moved to Berlin the following year. His decision to come on to Berlin was also influenced by the prospect of living near his cousin Elsa, with whom he had started a romantic affair. Einstein assumed his position with the academy, and Berlin University, after moving into his Dahlem apartment on 1 April 1914. As World War I broke out that year, the schedule for Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics was delayed. The institute was established on 1 October 1917, with Einstein as its director. In 1916, Einstein was elected president of the German Physical Society 1916–1918.

In 1911, Einstein used his 1907 perihelion precession of Mercury. In 1919, that deflection prediction was confirmed by Sir Arthur Eddington during the solar eclipse of 29 May 1919. Those observations were published in the international media, creating Einstein world-famous. On 7 November 1919, the leading British newspaper The Times printed a banner headline that read: "Revolution in Science – New Theory of the Universe – Newtonian Ideas Overthrown".

In 1920, he became a Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1922, he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and particularly for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". While the general theory of relativity was still considered somewhat controversial, the citation also does not treat even the cited photoelectric work as an explanation but merely as a discovery of the law, as the idea of photons was considered outlandish and did not get universal acceptance until the 1924 derivation of the Planck spectrum by S. N. Bose. Einstein was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society ForMemRS in 1921. He also received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 1925.

Einstein resigned from the Prussian Academy in March 1933. Einstein's scientific accomplishments while in Berlin, included finishing the general theory of relativity, proving the gyromagnetic effect, contributing to the quantum theory of radiation, and Bose–Einstein statistics/a>.