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| Albert Einstein |
Born in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany in
1879, Albert Einstein developed the
special and general theories of relativity. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize for
physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Einstein is generally
considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century. He died on April
18, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey.
Born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm,
Württemberg, Germany, Albert Einstein grew up in a secular, middle-class Jewish
family. His father, Hermann Einstein, was a salesman and engineer who, with his
brother, founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a company that
manufactured electrical equipment in Munich, Germany. His mother, the former
Pauline Koch, ran the family household. Einstein had one sister, Maja, born two
years after him.
Einstein attended elementary school at
the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich, where he excelled in his studies. He enjoyed
classical music and played the violin. However, he felt alienated and struggled
with the rigid Prussian education he received there. He also experienced a
speech difficulty, a slow cadence in his speaking where he’d pause to consider
what to say next. In later years, Einstein would write about two events that
had a marked effect on his childhood. One was an encounter with a compass at
age five, where he marveled at the invisible forces that turned the needle. The
other was at age 12, when he discovered a book of geometry which he read over
and over.
In 1889, the Einstein family invited a
poor medical Polish medical student, Max Talmud to come to their house for
Thursday evening meals. Talmud became an informal tutor to young Albert,
introducing him to higher mathematics and philosophy. One of the books Talmud
shared with Albert was a children’s science book in which the author imagined
riding alongside electricity that was traveling inside a telegraph wire.
Einstein began to wonder what a light beam would look like if you could run
alongside it at the same speed. If light were a wave, then the light beam
should appear stationary, like a frozen wave. Yet, in reality, the light beam
is moving. This paradox led him to write his first "scientific paper"
at age 16, "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic
Fields." This question of the relative speed to the stationary observer
and the observer moving with the light was a question that would dominate his
thinking for the next 10 years.
In 1894, Hermann Einstein’s company
failed to get an important contract to electrify the city of Munich and he was
forced to move his family to Milan, Italy. Albert was left at a boarding house
in Munich to finish his education at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Alone, miserable,
and repelled by the looming prospect of military duty when he turned of age,
Albert withdrew from school using a doctor’s note to excuse him and made his
way to Milan to join his parents. His parents sympathized with his feelings,
but were concerned about the enormous problems that he would face as a school
dropout and draft dodger with no employable skills.
Fortunately, Einstein was able to
apply directly to the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule (Swiss Federal
Polytechnic School) in Zürich, Switzerland. Lacking the equivalent of a high
school diploma, he failed much of the entrance exam but got exceptional marks
in mathematics and physics. Because of this, he was admitted to the school
provided he complete his formal schooling first. He went to a special high
school run by Jost Winteler in Aarau, Switzerland, and graduated in 1896 at age
17. He became lifelong friends with the Winteler family, with whom he had been boarding,
and fell in love with Wintelers' daughter, Marie. At this time, Einstein
renounced his German citizenship to avoid military service and enrolled at the
Zurich school.
Einstein would recall that his years
in Zurich were some of the happiest of his life. He met many students who would
become loyal friends, such as Marcel Grossmann, a mathematician, and Michele
Besso, with whom he enjoyed lengthy conversations about space and time. He also
met his future wife, Mileva Maric, a fellow physics student from Serbia.
After graduating from the Polytechnic
Institute, Albert Einstein faced a series of life crises over the next few
years. Because he liked to study on his own, he cut classes and earned the
animosity of some of his professors. One in particular, Heinrich Weber, wrote a
letter of recommendation at Einstein’s request that led to him being turned
down for every academic position that he applied to after graduation.
Meanwhile, Einstein's relationship with Maric deepened, but his parents
vehemently opposed the relationship citing her Serbian background and Eastern
Orthodox Christian religion. Einstein defied his parents and continued to see
Maric. In January, 1902, the couple had a daughter, Lieserl, who either died of
sickness or was given up for adoption—the facts are unkown.
At this point, Albert Einstein
probably reached the lowest point in his life. He could not marry Maric and
support a family without a job, and his father's business had gone bankrupt.
Desperate and unemployed, Einstein took lowly jobs tutoring children, but he
was unable to hold on to any of them. A turning point came later in 1902, when
the father of his lifelong friend, Marcel Grossman, recommended him for a
position as a clerk in the Swiss patent office in Bern, Switzerland. About this
time, Einstein’s father became seriously ill and just before he died, gave his
blessing for him to marry. With a small but steady income, Einstein married
Maric on Jan. 6, 1903. In May, 1904 they had their first son, Hans Albert.
Their second son, Eduard, were born in 1910.
Miracle Year
At the patent office, Albert Einstein
evaluated patent applications for electromagnetic devices. He quickly mastered
the job, leaving him time to ponder on the transmission of electrical signals
and electrical-mechanical synchronization, an interest he had been cultivating
for several years. While at the polytechnic school he had studied Scottish
physicist James Maxwell's electromagnetic theories which describe the nature of
light, and discovered a fact unknown to Maxwell himself, that the speed of
light remained constant.
However, this violated Isaac Newton's laws of motion because
there is no absolute velocity in Newton's theory. This insight led Einstein to
formulate the principle of relativity.
In 1905—often called Einstein's
"miracle year"—he submitted a paper for his doctorate and had four
papers published in the Annalen der Physik, one of the best known physics
journals. The four papers—the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special
relativity, and the equivalence of matter and energy—would alter the course of
modern physics and bring him to the attention of the academic world. In his
paper on matter and energy, Einstein deduced the well-known equation E=mc2,
suggesting that tiny particles of matter could be converted into huge amounts
of energy, foreshadowing the development of nuclear power. There have been
claims that Einstein and his wife, Maric, collaborated on his celebrated 1905
papers, but historians of physics who have studied the issue find no evidence
that she made any substantive contributions. In fact, in the papers, Einstein
only credits his conversations with Michele Besso in developing relativity.
At firstm Einstein's 1905 papers were
ignored by the physics community. This began to change when he received the
attention of Max Planck, perhaps the most influential physicist of his
generation and founder of quantum theory. With Planck’s complimentary comments
and his experiments that confirmed his theories, Einstein was invited to
lecture at international meetings and he rose rapidly in the academic world. He
was offered a series of positions at increasingly prestigious institutions,
including the University of Zürich, the University of Prague, the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology, and finally the University of Berlin, where he served
as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics from
1913 to 1933.
As his fame spread, Einstein's
marriage fell apart. His constant travel and intense study of his work, the
arguments about their children and the family’s meager finances led Einstein to
the conclusion that his marriage was over. Einstein began an affair with a
cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, whom he later married. He finally divorced Mileva in
1919 and as a settlement agreed to give her the money he might receive if he
ever won a Nobel Prize.
Theory of Relativity
In November, 1915, Einstein completed
the general theory of relativity, which he considered his masterpiece. He was
convinced that general relativity was correct because of its mathematical
beauty and because it accurately predicted the perihelion of Mercury's orbit
around the sun, which fell short in Newton’s theory. General relativity theory
also predicted a measurable deflection of light around the sun when a planet or
another sun oribited near the sun. That prediction was confirmed in
observations by British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington during the solar
eclipse of 1919. In 1921, Albert Einstein received word that he had received
the Nobel Prize for Physics. Because relativity was still considered
controversial, Einstein received the award for his explanation of the photoelectric
effect.
In the 1920s, Einstein launched the
new science of cosmology. His equations predicted that the universe is dynamic,
ever expanding or contracting. This contradicted the prevailing view that the
universe was static, a view that Einstein held earlier and was a guiding factor
in his development of the general theory of relativity. But his later
calculations in the general theory indicated that the universe could be
expanding or contracting. In 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble found that the universe was
indeed expanding, thereby confirming Einstein's work. In 1930, during a visit
to the Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles, Einstein met with Hubble and
declared the cosmological constant, his original theory of the static size and
shape of the universe, to be his "greatest blunder."
While Einstein was touring much of the
world speaking on his theories in the 1920s, the Nazis were rising to power
under the leadership of Adolph Hitler. Einstein’s theories on relativity became
a convenient target for Nazi propaganda. In 1931, the Nazi’s enlisted other
physicists to denounce Einstein and his theories as "Jewish physics."
At this time, Einstein learned that the new German government, now in full
control by the Nazi party, had passed a law barring Jews from holding any
official position, including teaching at universities. Einstein also learned
that his name was on a list of assassination targets, and a Nazi organization
published a magazine with Einstein's picture and the caption "Not Yet
Hanged" on the cover.
Move to the United States
In December, 1932, Einstein decided to
leave Germany forever. He took a position a the newly formed Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, which soon became a Mecca for
physicists from around the world. It was here that he would spend the rest of
his career trying to develop a unified field theory—an all-embracing theory
that would unify the forces of the universe, and thereby the laws of physics,
into one framework—and refute the accepted interpretation of quantum physics.
Other European scientists also fled various countries threatened by Nazi
takeover and came to the United States. Some of these scientists knew of Nazi
plans to develop an atomic weapon. For a time, their warnings to Washington,
D.C. went unheeded.
In the summer of 1939, Einstein, along
with another scientist, Leo Szilard, was persuaded to write a
letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to alert him of the
possibility of a Nazi bomb. President Roosevelt could not risk the possibility
that Germany might develop an atomic bomb first. The letter is believed to be
the key factor that motivated the United States to investigate the development
of nuclear weapons. Roosevelt invited Einstein to meet with him and soon after
the United States initiated the Manhattan Project.
Not long after he began his career at
the Institute in New Jersey, Albert Einstein expressed an appreciation for the
"meritocracy" of the United States and the right people had to think
what they pleased—something he didn’t enjoy as a young man in Europe.
In 1935, Albert Einstein was granted
permanent residency in the United States and became an American citizen in
1940. As the Manhattan Project moved from drawing board to testing and
development at Los Alamos, New Mexico, many of his colleagues were asked to
develop the first atomic bomb, but Eisenstein was not one of them. According to
several researchers who examined FBI files over the years, the reason was the
U.S. government didn't trust Einstein's lifelong association with peace and socialist
organizations. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover went so far as to recommend
that Einstein be kept out of America by the Alien Exclusion Act, but he was
overruled by the U.S. State Department. Instead, during the war, Einstein
helped the U.S. Navy evaluate designs for future weapons systems and contributed
to the war effort by auctioning off priceless personal manuscripts. One example
was a handwritten copy of his 1905 paper on special relativity which sold for
$6.5 million, and is now located in the Library of Congress.
On August 6, 1945, while on vacation,
Einstein heard the news that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima,
Japan. He soon became involved in an international effort to try to bring the
atomic bomb under control, and in 1946, he formed the Emergency Committee of
Atomic Scientists with physicist Leo Szilard. In 1947, in an article that
he wrote for The Atlantic Monthly, Einstein argued that the United
States should not try to monopolize the atomic bomb, but instead should supply
the United Nations with nuclear weapons for the sole purpose of maintaining a
deterrent. At this time, Einstein also became a member of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He corresponded with civil
rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois and actively campaigned for
the rights of African Americans.
After the war, Einstein continued to
work on many key aspects of the theory of general relativity, such as
wormholes, the possibility of time travel, the existence of black holes, and
the creation of the universe. However, he became increasingly isolated from the
rest of the physics community. With the huge developments in unraveling the
secrets of atoms and molecules, spurred on by the development to the atomic
bomb, the majority of scientists were working on the quantum theory, not
relativity. Another reason for Einstein's detachment from his colleagues was
his obsession with discovering his unified field theory. In the 1930s, Einstein
engaged in a series of historic private debates with Niels Bohr, the originator of the Bohr
atomic model. In a series of "thought experiments," Einstein tried to
find logical inconsistencies in the quantum theory, but was unsuccessful.
However, in his later years, he stopped opposing quantum theory and tried to
incorporate it, along with light and gravity, into the larger unified field
theory he was developing.
In the last decade of his life,
Einstein withdrew from public life, rarely traveling far and confining himself
to long walks around Princeton with close associates, whom he engaged in deep
conversations about politics, religion, physics and his unified field theory.
Final Years
On April 17, 1955, while working on a
speech he was preparing to commemorate Israel's 17th anniversary, Einstein
suffered an abdominal aortic aneurysm and experienced internal bleeding. He was
taken to the University Medical Center at Princeton for treatment, but refused
surgery, believing that he had lived his life and was content to accept his
fate. "I want to go when I want," he stated at the time. "It is
tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go.
I will do it elegantly." Einstein died at the university medical center
early the next morning—April 18, 1955—at the age of 76.
During the autopsy, Thomas Stoltz
Harvey removed Einstein's brain, seemingly without the permission of his
family, for preservation and future study by doctors of neuroscience. His
remains were cremated and his ashes were scattered in an undisclosed location.
After decades of study, Einstein's brain is now located at the Princeton
University Medical Center.
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