Albert Einstein - Biography

Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. Six weeks later the family moved to Munich, where he later on began his schooling at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Later, they moved to Italy and Albert continued his education at Aarau, Switzerland and in 1896 he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich to be trained as a teacher in physics and mathematics. In 1901, the year he gained his diploma, he acquired Swiss citizenship and, as he was unable to find a teaching post, he accepted a position as technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. In 1905 he obtained his doctor's degree.

During his stay at the Patent Office, and in his spare time, he produced much of his remarkable work and in 1908 he was appointed Privatdozent in Berne. In 1909 he became Professor Extraordinary at Zurich, in 1911 Professor of Theoretical Physics at Prague, returning to Zurich in the following year to fill a similar post. In 1914 he was appointed Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute and Professor in the University of Berlin. He became a German citizen in 1914 and remained in Berlin until 1933 when he renounced his citizenship for political reasons and emigrated to America to take the position of Professor of Theoretical Physics at Princeton*. He became a United States citizen in 1940 and retired from his post in 1945.

After World War II, Einstein was a leading figure in the World Government Movement, he was offered the Presidency of the State of Israel, which he declined, and he collaborated with Dr. Chaim Weizmann in establishing the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Einstein always appeared to have a clear view of the problems of physics and the determination to solve them. He had a strategy of his own and was able to visualize the main stages on the way to his goal. He regarded his major achievements as mere stepping-stones for the next advance.

At the start of his scientific work, Einstein realized the inadequacies of Newtonian mechanics and his special theory of relativity stemmed from an attempt to reconcile the laws of mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. He dealt with classical problems of statistical mechanics and problems in which they were merged with quantum theory: this led to an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules. He investigated the thermal properties of light with a low radiation density and his observations laid the foundation of the photon theory of light.

In his early days in Berlin, Einstein postulated that the correct interpretation of the special theory of relativity must also furnish a theory of gravitation and in 1916 he published his paper on the general theory of relativity. During this time he also contributed to the problems of the theory of radiation and statistical mechanics.

In the 1920's, Einstein embarked on the construction of unified field theories, although he continued to work on the probabilistic interpretation of quantum theory, and he persevered with this work in America. He contributed to statistical mechanics by his development of the quantum theory of a monatomic gas and he has also accomplished valuable work in connection with atomic transition probabilities and relativistic cosmology.

After his retirement he continued to work towards the unification of the basic concepts of physics, taking the opposite approach, geometrisation, to the majority of physicists.

Einstein's researches are, of course, well chronicled and his more important works includeSpecial Theory of Relativity (1905), Relativity (English translations, 1920 and 1950), General Theory of Relativity (1916), Investigations on Theory of Brownian Movement (1926), and The Evolution of Physics (1938). Among his non-scientific works, About Zionism (1930), Why War?(1933), My Philosophy (1934), and Out of My Later Years (1950) are perhaps the most important.

Albert Einstein received honorary doctorate degrees in science, medicine and philosophy from many European and American universities. During the 1920's he lectured in Europe, America and the Far East and he was awarded Fellowships or Memberships of all the leading scientific academies throughout the world. He gained numerous awards in recognition of his work, including the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London in 1925, and the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1935.

Einstein's gifts inevitably resulted in his dwelling much in intellectual solitude and, for relaxation, music played an important part in his life. He married Mileva Maric in 1903 and they had a daughter and two sons; their marriage was dissolved in 1919 and in the same year he married his cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, who died in 1936. He died on April 18, 1955 at Princeton, New Jersey.

Historians still call the year 1905 the annus mirabilis, the miracle year because in that year Einstein published four remarkable scientific papers ranging from the smallest scale to the largest, through fundamental problems about the nature of energy, matter, motion, time and space.

• In March 1905 , Einstein created the quantum theory of light, the idea that light exists as tiny packets, or particles, which he called photons. Alongside Max Planck's work on quanta of heat Einstein proposed one of the most shocking idea in twentieth century physics: we live in a quantum universe, one built out of tiny, discrete chunks of energy and matter.

• Next, in April and May, Einstein published two papers. In one he invented a new method of counting and determining the size of the atoms or molecules in a given space and in the other he explains the phenomenon of Brownian motion. The net result was a proof that atoms actually exist - still an issue at that time - and the end to a millennia-old debate on the fundamental nature of the chemical elements.

• And then, in June, Einstein completed special relativity - which added a twist to the story: Einstein's March paper treated light as particles, but special relativity sees light as a continuous field of waves. Such a contradiction took a supremely confident mind to propose. Einstein, age 26, saw light as wave and particle, picking the attribute he needed to confront each problem in turn.

• Einstein wasn't finished yet. Later in 1905 came an extension of special relativity in which Einstein proved that energy and matter are linked in the most famous relationship in physics:
  E=mc². (The energy content of a body is equal to the mass of the body times the speed of light squared).
  This equation predicted an evolution of energy roughly a million times more efficient than that obtained by ordinary physiochemical means. At first, even Einstein did not grasp the full implications of his formula, but even then he suggested that the heat produced by radium could mark the conversion of tiny amounts of the mass of the radium salts into energy.

And after 1905, Einstein achieved what no one since has equaled: a twenty year run at the cutting edge of physics. For all the miracles of his miracle year, his best work was still to come:

In 1907, he confronted the problem of gravitation. Einstein began his work with one crucial insight: gravity and acceleration are equivalent, two facets of the same phenomenon.

Before anyone else, Einstein recognized the essential dualism in nature, the co-existence of particles and waves at the level of quanta. In 1911 he declared resolving the quantum issue to be the central problem of physics.

Even the minor works resonated. For example, in 1910, Einstein answered a basic question: 'Why is the sky blue?' His paper on the phenomenon called critical opalescence solved the problem by examining the cumulative effect of the scattering of light by individual molecules in the atmosphere.

• Then in 1915, Einstein completed the General Theory of Relativity - the product of eight years of work on the problem of gravity. In general relativity Einstein shows that matter and energy actually mold the shape of space and the flow of time. What we feel as the 'force' of gravity is simply the sensation of following the shortest path we can through curved, four-dimensional space-time. It is a radical vision: space is no longer the box the universe comes in; instead, space and time, matter and energy are, as Einstein proves, locked together in the most intimate embrace.

  ( Look at a scenario designed by HHO to explain of why time varies according to general relativity theory - see Time variations)

• In 1917, Einstein published a paper which uses general relativity to model the behavior of an entire universe. Einstein's paper was the first in the modern field of cosmology - the study of the behavior of the universe as a whole.

  Returning to the quantum, by 1919, six years before the invention of quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle Einstein recognized that there might be a problem with the classical notion of cause and effect. Given the peculiar, dual nature of quanta as both waves and particles, it might be impossible, he warned, to definitively tie effects to their causes.

• In 1924 and 1925 Einstein still made significant contributions to the development of quantum theory. His last work on the theory built on ideas developed by Satyendra Nath Bose, and predicted a new state of matter (to add to the list of solid, liquid, and gas) called a Bose-Einstein condensate. The condensate was finally created at exceptionally low temperatures only last year.

Einstein always had a distaste for modern quantum theory - largely because its probabilistic nature forbids a complete description of cause and effect. But still, he recognized many of the fundamental implications of the idea of the quantum long before the rest of the physics community did. (In 'Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel' by Hoffmann, the author describes that Max Planck himself was sceptical of his own quantum hypothesis which was highly distasteful to him and introduced merely as 'an act of desperation'. Between 1900 and 1905 the quantum concept remained in limbo. In all the world there seems to have been in those years only one man to dare take it seriously. That man was Einstein who immediately sensed the importance of Planck's work and used the idea in his own paper about the theory of light).

After the quantum mechanical revolution of 1925 through 1927, Einstein spent the bulk of his remaining scientific career searching for a deeper theory to subsume quantum mechanics and eliminate its probabilities and uncertainties. He generated pages of equations, geometrical descriptions of fields extending through many dimensions that could unify all the known forces of nature. None of the theories worked out. It was a waste of time ... and yet :

• Contemporary theoretical physics is dominated by what are known as 'String theories.' They are multi-dimensional. (Some versions include as many as 26 dimensions, with fifteen or sixteen curled up in a tiny ball.) They are geometrical - the interactions of one multi-dimensional shape with another produces the effects we call forces, just as the 'force' of gravity in general relativity is what we feel as we move through the curves of four-dimensional space-time. And they unify, no doubt about it: in the math, at least, all of nature from quantum mechanics to gravity emerges from the equations of string theory.

  As it stands, string theories are unproved, and perhaps unprovable, as they involve interactions at energy levels far beyond any we can handle. But they are beautiful, to those versed enough in the language of mathematics to follow them. And in their beauty (and perhaps in their impenetrability) they are the heirs to Einstein's primitive, first attempts to produce a unified field theory.

Between 1905 to 1925, Einstein transformed humankind's understanding of nature on every scale, from the smallest to that of the cosmos as a whole. Now, nearly a century after he began to make his mark, we are still exploring Einstein's universe.