Pragmatic and disciplined in his … General relativity (GR) is a theory of gravitation that was developed by Einstein between 1907 and 1915. During his lifetime, Albert Einstein came up with some amazing theories about light, matter, gravity, space and time and soon enjoyed world-wide fame! The Life and Career of Albert Einstein This man said that “imagination is more important than knowledge.” Early Life Born March 14th, 1879 in Germany, Albert Einstein’s early scientific interest can be traced to a simple compass he was shown at the age of five, which prompted him to wonder what controlled its movement. When he was six-years-old, his younger brother Eduard Einsteinwas born, and four years later his parents separated. [156] However, later in his life, Einstein's political view was in favor of socialism and critical of capitalism, which he detailed in his essays such as "Why Socialism? [13] He settled in the United States and became an American citizen in 1940. Follow us on social media Ring in the new year with a Britannica Membership, From graduation to the “miracle year” of scientific theories, Personal sorrow, World War II, and the atomic bomb, Increasing professional isolation and death, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Albert-Einstein, Jewish Virtual Library - Biography of Albert Einstein, Wolfram Research - Eric Weisstein's World of Scientific Biography - Biography of Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize - Biography of Albert Einstein, NASA - StarChild - Biography of Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11), Albert Einstein - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up). The 12-year-old Einstein taught himself algebra and Euclidean geometry over a single summer. [75][76] On 30 April 1905, Einstein completed his thesis,[77] with Alfred Kleiner, Professor of Experimental Physics, serving as pro-forma advisor. He worked on theoretical physics. 1 Timothy Kusky, Encyclopedia of Earth and Space Science (New York: Facts on File, Inc.,2010), p.241. Through Albert Einstein, the "pope of physics" the "Institute for Advanced Study" became in the following years the most famous research centre of the world. In June 1913, the Entwurf ('draft') theory was the result of these investigations. [242] In a thought experiment, he considered two particles which had interacted such that their properties were strongly correlated. He was officially elected to the academy on 24 July, and he moved to Berlin the following year. In his late journals he wrote: "If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. After initially struggling to find work, from 1902 to 1909 he was employed as a patent examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. Albert Einstein was born in 1879 in Germany. [246] Although he continued to be lauded for his work, Einstein became increasingly isolated in his research, and his efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. Albert Einstein (/ˈaɪnstaɪn/ EYEN-styne;[4] German: [ˈalbɛʁt ˈʔaɪnʃtaɪn] (listen); 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist[5] who developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics). He was skeptical that the randomness of quantum mechanics was fundamental rather than the result of determinism, stating that God "is not playing at dice". [89] In 1922, he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". [61] 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). I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise. ", It thus appears that Einstein considered a steady-state model of the expanding universe many years before Hoyle, Bondi and Gold. [109][110], While at American universities in early 1933, he undertook his third two-month visiting professorship at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Einstein's light quanta were nearly universally rejected by all physicists, including Max Planck and Niels Bohr. Ohana. Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Germany, but he grew up and obtained his early education in Munich, Germany. The letter is believed to be "arguably the key stimulus for the U.S. adoption of serious investigations into nuclear weapons on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War II". Her hopes to have a teaching career however dashed to grounds as she failed the examination in 1900, the same year Einstein was bestowed with the diploma. Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire, on 14 March 1879. Throughout the 1910s, quantum mechanics expanded in scope to cover many different systems. [119], Einstein later contacted leaders of other nations, including Turkey's Prime Minister, İsmet İnönü, to whom he wrote in September 1933 requesting placement of unemployed German-Jewish scientists. [258] He is a favorite model for depictions of absent-minded professors; his expressive face and distinctive hairstyle have been widely copied and exaggerated. In order to show this, they reversed the magnetization in an iron bar suspended on a torsion pendulum. No matter how far the two particles were separated, a precise position measurement on one particle would result in equally precise knowledge of the position of the other particle; likewise a precise momentum measurement of one particle would result in equally precise knowledge of the momentum of the other particle, without needing to disturb the other particle in any way. He said that "love is a better teacher than a sense of duty. [clarification needed][85] As World War I broke out that year, the plan for Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics was aborted. He considered racism America's "worst disease",[114] seeing it as "handed down from one generation to the next". He maintained that the non-covariant energy momentum pseudotensor was, in fact, the best description of the energy momentum distribution in a gravitational field. Learn about careers at Einstein Careers Healthcare Network. The following year, he acquired Swiss citizenship, which he kept for his entire life. The Annus Mirabilis papers are four articles pertaining to the photoelectric effect (which gave rise to quantum theory), Brownian motion, the special theory of relativity, and E = mc2 that Einstein published in the Annalen der Physik scientific journal in 1905. His father, Hermann, managed a featherbed business in Ulm, which was situated on the River Danube in southern Germany. Albert Einstein's work in 1905 shook the world of physics. In 1905, called his annus mirabilis ('miracle year'), he published four groundbreaking papers which attracted the attention of the academic world; the first paper outlined the theory of the photoelectric effect, the second explained Brownian motion, the third introduced special relativity, and the fourth mass–energy equivalence. Born in Bern, Switzerland on May 14, 1904, Hans Albert Einstein was the second child of Albert and his wife Mileva Marić. Einstein liked the working conditions at the institute. These four works contributed substantially to the foundation of modern physics and changed views on space, time, and matter. With the help of Marcel Grossmann's father, he secured a job in Bern at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property, the patent office,[67][68] as an assistant examiner – level III. [3] He also received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 1925. [note 5][197], Einstein originally framed special relativity in terms of kinematics (the study of moving bodies). [135] In 1954, a year before his death, Einstein said to his old friend, Linus Pauling, "I made one great mistake in my life—when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification—the danger that the Germans would make them ..."[136] In 1955, Einstein and ten other intellectuals and scientists, including British philosopher Bertrand Russell, signed a manifesto highlighting the danger of nuclear weapons. Albert Einstein is the most influential physicist of the 20th century, and just might be the most famous scientist to have ever lived. 11 Katie Parker, The Theory of Relativity (New York: Marshall Cavendish, 2010), p.22. [106] Chaplin visited Einstein at his home on a later trip to Berlin and recalled his "modest little flat" and the piano at which he had begun writing his theory. [233] It was not until 1995 that the first such condensate was produced experimentally by Eric Allin Cornell and Carl Wieman using ultra-cooling equipment built at the NIST–JILA laboratory at the University of Colorado at Boulder. How proud we must be to offer him temporary shelter. However, after publishing the findings, they promptly withdrew their support, because they no longer had confidence in the correctness of the idea of zero-point energy.[236]. Mainstream physics, in turn, largely ignored Einstein's approaches to unification. Career highlights. But he does suggest that this idea would explain certain experimental results, notably the photoelectric effect. [21][22], Einstein always excelled at math and physics from a young age, reaching a mathematical level years ahead of his peers. Soon, this idea attracted the attention of Einstein and his assistant Otto Stern. In that article titled "On the Relativity Principle and the Conclusions Drawn from It", he argued that free fall is really inertial motion, and that for a free-falling observer the rules of special relativity must apply. Einstein's theories expanded upon universal laws formulated by physicist Isaac Newton in the late seventeenth century Albert Einstein: Albert Einstein was the greatest physicist of the 20th century. [237] [152][153], In 1931, while engaged in research at the California Institute of Technology, he visited the Zoellner family conservatory in Los Angeles, where he played some of Beethoven and Mozart's works with members of the Zoellner Quartet. [33], This paper predicted that, when measured in the frame of a relatively moving observer, a clock carried by a moving body would appear to slow down, and the body itself would contract in its direction of motion. Around 1886 Albert Einstein began his school career in Munich. [256], In the period before World War II, The New Yorker published a vignette in their "The Talk of the Town" feature saying that Einstein was so well known in America that he would be stopped on the street by people wanting him to explain "that theory". [80][81] During his Prague stay, he wrote 11 scientific works, five of them on radiation mathematics and on the quantum theory of solids. "[111] One German magazine included him in a list of enemies of the German regime with the phrase, "not yet hanged", offering a $5,000 bounty on his head. [111] The Nazis later sold his boat and converted his cottage into a Hitler Youth camp. "[151] At age 17, he was heard by a school examiner in Aarau while playing Beethoven's violin sonatas. One is as though nothing is a miracle. Celebrating Einstein "Solid Cold". 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. "[111] After moving to the US, he described the book burnings as a "spontaneous emotional outburst" by those who "shun popular enlightenment", and "more than anything else in the world, fear the influence of men of intellectual independence". In 1880, the family moved to Munich, where Einstein's father and his uncle Jakob founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a company that manufactured electrical equipment based on direct current. [213] He discovered that the general field equations predicted a universe that was dynamic, either contracting or expanding. Einstein gave a speech about racism in America, adding, "I do not intend to be quiet about it. For the 75th anniversary of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, he stated that the idea of Ethical Culture embodied his personal conception of what is most valuable and enduring in religious idealism. [248] On 11 November 1930, U.S. Patent 1,781,541 was awarded to Einstein and Leó Szilárd for the refrigerator. [54][55][56][57] In a volume of letters released by Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2006,[58] 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. "[17], Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire, on 14 March 1879. Over the next few years, Einstein's and Marić's friendship developed into romance, and they spent countless hours debating and reading books together on extra-curricular physics in which they were both interested. [243], Given Einstein's concept of local realism, there were two possibilities: (1) either the other particle had these properties already determined, or (2) the process of measuring the first particle instantaneously affected the reality of the position and momentum of the second particle. [164] He did not believe in a personal god who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings, a view which he described as naïve. [116][117], Locker-Lampson took Einstein to meet Winston Churchill at his home, and later, Austen Chamberlain and former Prime Minister Lloyd George. From the age of 5 for 3 years at the age of eight. He published more than 300 scientific papers and more than 150 non-scientific works. "[169], Einstein was primarily affiliated with non-religious humanist and Ethical Culture groups in both the UK and US. [177] Einstein's remains were cremated and his ashes were scattered at an undisclosed location. [145], Chaim Weizmann later became Israel's first president. Erwin Schrödinger applied this to derive the thermodynamic properties of a semiclassical ideal gas. 3.2. This article showed that the statistics of absorption and emission of light would only be consistent with Planck's distribution law if the emission of light into a mode with n photons would be enhanced statistically compared to the emission of light into an empty mode. [143] He also submitted various suggestions as to its initial programs. The Theory of Relativity. "Denunciation of German Policy is a Stirring Event". At the end of December 1894, he traveled to Italy to join his family in Pavia, convincing the school to let him go by using a doctor's note. Soon after publishing his work on special relativity, Einstein began working to extend the theory to gravitational fields; he then published a paper on general relativity in 1916, introducing his theory of gravitation. His research spanned from quantum mechanics to theories about gravity and motion. [69][70], Einstein evaluated patent applications for a variety of devices including a gravel sorter and an electromechanical typewriter. "[25], In 1895, at the age of 16, Einstein took the entrance examinations for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zürich (later the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, ETH). Later on they heard that their cottage was raided by the Nazis and his personal sailboat confiscated. They confirmed that this leads the bar to rotate, because the electron's angular momentum changes as the magnetization changes. Albert Einstein is best known for his equation E = mc2, which states that energy and mass (matter) are the same thing, just in different forms. Einstein adopted Minkowski's formalism in his 1915 general theory of relativity.[198]. The court's initial decision no longer has any legal impact or effect of any kind. Her hopes to have a teaching career however dashed to grounds as she failed the examination in 1900, the same year Einstein was bestowed with the diploma. This would lead to a lifelong fascination with invisible forces. Some say that as a result of Einstein's letter and his meetings with Roosevelt, the US entered the "race" to develop the bomb, drawing on its "immense material, financial, and scientific resources" to initiate the Manhattan Project. [95][96], Because of Einstein's travels to the Far East, he was unable to personally accept the Nobel Prize for Physics at the Stockholm award ceremony in December 1922.