Albert Einstein Theory of relativity is the foundation of modern physics and the equation E=mc2 is considered the world’s most famous equation.
Albert Einstein was a Jew born by Jews Parents living German Empire in 19th century And became a theoretical physicist who is considered one of the greatest and most influential scientists of all time.
He is best known for his theory of relativity and development of quantum mechanics.
He was a central figure in reshaping the scientific understanding of nature in modern physics which had been accomplished in the first decades of the twentieth century.
His equation that relates mass with energy, E=mc2 is considered the world’s most famous equation.
Einstein’s Quick facts
Here are few things you may need to know about Albert Einstein.
- Real Name: Albert Einstein
- Gender: Male
- Age: Died at 76 years 0 months 25 days
- Birth Date: 14th March 1879
- Place of Birth: Ulm, Kingdom of Württemberg, German.
- Height: 1.7 m
- Marital Status: Married twice
- Wife’s Name: Mileva Maric (1903-1919), Elsa Löwenthal(1919-died 1936)
- Children: Lieserl, Hans Albert, Eduard Albert
- Occupation: Theoretical Physicist
- Death: 8th April 1955
- Hobbies: Playing Music with Piano
Einstein Early Life
He was born in Ulm in the n the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire, on 14 March 1879 by secular Askenazi Jews.
His father, Hermann Einstein was a salesman and an engineer who had married Einstein’s mother Mrs. Pauline Koch,a Jew.
His Family moved to Munich’s borough(District) of Ludwigsvorstadt-Isarvorstadt where his father partnered with his uncle Jakob to establish a company that manufactured D.C electrical equipments.
Albert Einstein was enrolled at Catholic elementary school in Munich in 1884. In 1887, he was transferred to Luitpold-Gymnasium where he received advanced primary and secondary education.
His father’s company failed to secure a contract to install electric lighting in Munich beacuse it lacked a capacity to provide alternating current (A.C) technology which was needed. Consequentially, they sold the company and moved the family to Milan Italy and few months later, they moved to settle at Palazzo Cornazzani in Pavia, in Lombardy, where they lived between 1895 and 1896. Einstein was left at Munich so that he can finish school.
His father wanted him to study electrical Engineering but he was irritable and quarrelsome child that criticized school. He was quoted saying that the school’s policy of strict rote learning could never help in creativity.
At the end of December 1894, a letter from a doctor persuaded the Luitpold’s authorities to release him from its care, and he joined his family in Pavia.
Einstein the genius
Einstein excelled in physics and mathematics from an early age and quickly acquired mathematical skills that could match the ability of students that were several years ahead of him in school.
A family tutor, Max Talmud, expressed frustrations with Einstein beacuse Einstein speed of learning was higher than the teacher could catch up.
By age of fourteen, he had already mastered the concepts of integral and differential calculus. At age of twelve, he confidently claimed that nature could be described as a mathematical structure.
His tutor said that at age of only thirteen, he could understand and enjoy Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason which was usually difficult to understand by common people.
Albert Einstein Education
Albert Einstein sat the entrance examination for the federal polytechnic school in 1895 in Zürich, Switzerland and failed to reach the required standard in the general part of the test though he performed with distinction in physics and mathematics.
He completed his secondary education at the Argovian cantonal school (a gymnasium) in Aarau, Switzerland and graduated in 1896.
He enrolled in the four-year mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Federal polytechnic school in 1896.
Einstein graduated from the Federal polytechnic school in 1900, duly certified as competent to teach mathematics and physics.
He successfully acquired Swiss citizenship in 1901 but was rejected for Switzerland mandatory military service and could not be accepted for a teaching position in any school in Switzerland within two years of looking for a job.
career life
However with a help of his friend’s father, a friend who was also a classmate, he was able to secure a job at Swiss Patent Office as an assistant examiner-level III. In 1903, he was confirmed in permanent basis in the company.
It is suspected that his work experiences in the job contributed to his insights about his special theory of relativity.
He stayed in his job long time without being promoted because they claimed that he could not master machine technology.
He arrived at his revolutionary ideas about space, time and light through imagining experiments about the transmission of signals and the synchronization of clocks, matters which also figured in some of the inventions submitted to him for assessment.
In 1902, together with friends he had met in Bern, they formed a science club they called ‘Olympia Academy’ in which they met regularly to discuss science and philosophy.
When in sabbatical leave as a civil servant, he secured a junior teaching position at the University of Bern.
A lecture he gave on relativistic electrodynamics in 1909 in University of Zurich as an invited guest earned him a position in the university as an associate Professor through the influence of Alfred Kleiner, A Swiss Physicist and a professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Zurich.
He was promoted to full professorship in 1911 when he accepted a position of departmental chair at the German Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague in Czech republic which caused him citizenship in Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In 1912, He returned to Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich to take up a position of departmental chair in theoretical Physics.
His fields of specialization in teaching included thermodynamics and analytical mechanics.
His research interests included :
- Molecular theory of heat
- Continuum mechanics
- Development of a relativistic theory of gravitation
He research work was partnered with his friend, Marcel Grossmann, who helped him with mathematical modelling in his works.
Max Plank and Walther Nernst visited Zurich in 1913 and successfully convinced Einstein to relocate to Berlin using their influence to provide him positions in Prussian Academy of science, kaiser Wilhem Institute of Physics and Humboldt University with good salary but without teaching duties that could burden him. He partly accepted their offer because Berlin was a home to his girlfriend, Elsa Löwenthal.
He moved into an apartment in the Berlin district of Dahlem on April 1914 and was installed in his Humboldt University position after a short time.
Einstein’s Marriage and Relationships
He fell in love with a daughter of a family that had accommodated him while he was trying to finish secondary school at the Argovian cantonal school (a gymnasium) in Aarau, Switzerland.
While in polytechnic, he befriended the only woman in their class, Serbian, Mileva Marić and Einstein spent most of his time in college with her as they discussed their shared interest in physics and who become his study partner.
He married his first wife, Serbian, Mileva Marić in 1903 and they gave birth to a son called Hans Albert while they were in Bern, Switzerland In 1904.
While in Zurich, Their second son Eduard was born in 1910.
Einstein entered into a relationship with Elsa Löwenthal In 1912, who was both his first cousin on his mother’s side and his second cousin on his father’s. This caused Marić to return to Zurich with her two sons and they successfully applied for a divorce in 1919 on the grounds of having lived apart for five years. Einstein married Elsa Löwenthal the same year.
Four years later he began a relationship with a secretary named Betty Neumann, the niece of his close friend Hans Mühsam.
Löwenthal nevertheless remained loyal to him, accompanying him when he emigrated to the United States in 1933. In 1935, she was diagnosed with heart and kidney problems and She passed on in December 1936.
A volume of letters discovered by Hebrew University of Jerusalem added further names to the list of women he was romantically related to. About six of them.
After being widowed, Einstein was briefly involved in a relationship with Margarita Konenkova who was believed to be a Russian spy and who was married to a Russian sculptor Sergei Konenkov.
His son eduard was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He spent the remainder of his life in the care of his mother or sometimes in asylum. After death of his mum, he was permanently committed to Burghölzli, the Psychiatric University Hospital in Zürich, until his death in 1965.
Mileva Marić suffered a severe stroke and died at age 72 in 1948, in Zürich. She was burried at Nordheim-Cemetery.
Rise to Fame
Einstein began his new life as an intellectual icon in America after arriving there on 2nd April 1921. He was welcomed to New York City by Mayor John Francis Hylan and then spent three weeks giving lectures and attending receptions. He spoke several times at Columbia University and Princeton and in Washington, he visited the White House with representatives of the National Academy of Sciences. He returned to Europe via London, where he was the guest of the philosopher and statesman Viscount Haldane. He used his time in the British capital to meet several people prominent in British scientific, political or intellectual life, and to deliver a lecture at King’s College.
Einstein and politics
Einstein’s political view was in favor of socialism and he was noted criticizing capitalism. He was among the founder of a political party, German Democratic party.
He was called on to give judgments and opinions on matters related to society away from science and mathematics.
He criticized a political party that took power in Germany in 1917 for not having a well regulated system of government and called their rule a regime of terror and a tragedy in human history.
He strongly advocated the idea of a democratic global government that would check the power of nation states in the framework of a world federation.
Contribution to science
He published more than 300 scientific papers and 150 non-scientific ones.
On 5 December 2014, universities and archives announced the release of Einstein’s papers, comprising more than 30,000 unique documents.
He also collaborated with other scientists on additional projects including the Bose–Einstein statistics, the Einstein refrigerator and many others works.
His Annus Mirabilis papers of 1905 contains four articles pertaining to the photoelectric effect which gave rise to quantum theory, Brownian motion, special relativity and the famous Einstein’s equation, E=mc2. This four articles contributed immensely to the foundation of modern Physics and changed views about space, time and matter.
His paper submitted in 1900 to Annalen der Physik was published in 1901 with the title “Conclusions from the capillary phenomena” that describes capillary attraction.
Two papers he published between 1902 and 1903 were the foundations on publication about Brownian motion which showed that Brownian Movement can be constructed as firm evidence that molecules exist.
The theory of critical opalescence publication discussed the problem of thermodynamic fluctuations giving a treatment of the density variations in a fluid at its critical point.
His paper on On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies published on June 1905 resolved the conflicts between Maxwell’s equation and the laws of Newtonian mechanics by introducing changes to the laws of mechanics.
He developed the Theory of general relativity between 1907 and 1915 that has become an essential tool in modern astrophysics providing the foundation for the current understanding of black holes.
In 1911, He published an article on the Influence of Gravitation on propagation of light adding on 1907 publications in which he estimated the amount of deflection of light by massive bodies enabling theoretical predictions of general relativity to be tested experimentally for the first time.
In 1916, Einstein predicted gravitational waves ripples in the curvature of spacetime which propagate as waves, traveling outward from the source, transporting energy as gravitational radiation.
He started a research about general relativistic field theory where he looked for fully generally covariant tensor equations and searched for equations that would be invariant under general linear transformations only which gave birth to the draft theory of 1913.
Einstein applied general theory of relativity to the structure of the universe as a whole. He discovered that the general field equations predicted a universe that was dynamic, either contracting or expanding.
Einstein collaborated with Nathan Rosen to produce a model of a wormhole, often called Einstein–Rosen bridges in 1935.
see about refraction of light.
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