Biography of albert einstein pdf
Further research published in found that the entire universe may be rippling with a faint "gravitational wave background," emitted by ancient, colliding black holes. Find answers to frequently asked questions about Albert Einstein on the Nobel Prize website.
Biography of albert einstein summary
Flip through digitized versions of Einstein's published and unpublished manuscripts at Einstein Archives Online. This article was last updated on March 11, by Live Science editor Brandon Specktor to include new information about how Einstein's theories have been validated by modern experiments. Adam Mann is a freelance journalist with over a decade of experience, specializing in astronomy and physics stories.
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More about physics mathematics. Cosmic voids may explain the universe's acceleration without dark energy. Most Popular. Eventually, he was asked to leave by the authorities because his indifference was setting a bad example to other students. He applied for admission to the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
His first attempt was a failure because he failed exams in botany, zoology and languages. However, he passed the next year and in became a Swiss citizen. At college, he met a fellow student Mileva Maric, and after a long friendship, they married in ; they had two sons before divorcing several years later. In Einstein renounced his German citizenship to avoid military conscription.
For five years he was stateless, before successfully applying for Swiss citizenship in After graduating from Zurich college, he attempted to gain a teaching post but none was forthcoming; instead, he gained a job in the Swiss Patent Office. While working at the Patent Office, Einstein continued his own scientific discoveries and began radical experiments to consider the nature of light and space.
In addition to working on his PhD, Einstein also worked feverishly on other papers. In , he published four pivotal scientific works, which would revolutionise modern physics. He took Austrian-Hungary citizenship to accept the job.
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In , he returned to Germany and was appointed a director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. From this Quantum Theory, other inventors were able to develop devices such as television and movies. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in This theory was written in a simple style with no footnotes or academic references. The core of his theory of relativity is that:.
Thus there is no fixed absolute standard of comparison for judging the motion of the earth or plants. It was revolutionary because previously people had thought time and distance are absolutes. But, Einstein proved this not to be true. He also said that if electrons travelled at close to the speed of light, their weight would increase.
Working from a basis of special relativity. Einstein sought to express all physical laws using equations based on mathematical equations. He devoted the last period of his life trying to formulate a final unified field theory which included a rational explanation for electromagnetism. However, he was to be frustrated in searching for this final breakthrough theory.
He based this on his new general theory of relativity. In the first paper, he applied the quantum theory developed by German physicist Max Planck to light in order to explain the phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect, by which a material will emit electrically charged particles when hit by light. To do this, Einstein introduced his special theory of relativity, which held that the laws of physics are the same even for objects moving in different inertial frames i.
A fourth paper concerned the fundamental relationship between mass and energy, concepts viewed previously as completely separate. Einstein continued working at the patent office until , when he finally found a full-time academic post at the University of Zurich. In , he arrived at the University of Berlin, where he was made director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics.
In , Einstein published the general theory of relativity, which he considered his masterwork. This theory found that gravity, as well as motion, can affect time and space. In , two expeditions sent to perform experiments during a solar eclipse found that light rays from distant stars were deflected or bent by the gravity of the sun in just the way Einstein had predicted.
In , he won the Nobel Prize for his work on the photoelectric effect, as his work on relativity remained controversial at the time. Einstein soon began building on his theories to form a new science of cosmology, which held that the universe was dynamic instead of static, and was capable of expanding and contracting. Turning to cosmological problems the following year, Einstein found a solution to his field equations consistent with the picture the Einstein universe that the universe is static, approximately uniformly filled with a finite amount of matter, and finite but unbounded in the same sense that the surface area of a smooth globe is finite but has no beginning or end.
Fellow physicists were always struck with Einstein's uncanny ability to penetrate to the heart of a complex problem, to instantly see the physical significance of a complex mathematical result. Both in his scientific and in his personal life, he was utterly independent, a trait that manifested itself in his approach to scientific problems, in his unconventional dress, in his relationships with family and friends, and in his aloofness from university and governmental politics in spite of his intense social consciousness.
Einstein loved to discuss scientific problems with friends, but he was, fundamentally a "horse for single harness. Einstein's belief in strict causality was closely related to his profound belief in the harmony of nature. That nature can be understood rationally, in mathematical terms, never ceased to evoke a deep—one might say, religious—feeling of admiration in him.
Einstein argued that while we learn certain features of the world from experience, the free inventive capacity of the human mind is required to formulate physical theories. There is no logical link between the world of experience and the world of theory. Once a theory has been formulated, however, it must be "simple" or, perhaps, "esthetically pleasing" and agree with experiment.
One such esthetically pleasing and fully confirmed theory is the special theory of relativity. When Einstein was informed of D. Miller's experiments, which seemed to contradict the special theory by demanding the reinstatement of the ether, he expressed his belief in the spuriousness of Miller's results—and therefore in the harmoniousness of nature—with another of his famous aphorisms, "God is subtle, but he is not malicious.
This frequent use of God's name in Einstein's speeches and writings provides us with a feeling for his religious convictions. He once stated explicitly, "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the harmony of all being, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men. But the greater his knowledge, the nearer is his approach to God.
To enumerate at this point the many honors that were bestowed upon Einstein during his lifetime would be to devote space to the kind of public acclamation that mattered so little to Einstein himself. How, indeed, can other human beings sufficiently honor one of their number who revolutionized their conception of the physical world, and who lived his life in the conviction that "the only life worth living is a life spent in the service of others"?
When Einstein lay dying he could truly utter, as he did, "Here on earth I have done my job. He gave me the stubbornness of a mule and nothing else; really, He also gave me a keen scent. Numerous biographies of Einstein have been written. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times Einstein's illuminating "Autobiographical Notes" and bibliographies of his scientific and nonscientific writings can be found in P.
Schilpp, ed. Princeton, New Jersey. A lbert Einstein was already a world-famous scientist when he immigrated to the United States in Over his lifetime, he had three nationalities: German, Swiss, and American. He also was Jewish, which led him to support the founding of the state of Israel. But as the top physicist in the twentieth century, Einstein in some ways rose above nationalities to become a citizen of the world.
His story as a world citizen cast a different light on the larger subject of emigration and migration across national borders. Albert Einstein was the son of a middle-class Jewish businessman. Einstein was born in Germany, a country that had been unified into a single state only eight years before his birth.
Rein vollenga biography of albert einstein
Previously, a group of kingdoms, of which Prussia was the largest, had occupied the territory brought together into a single kingdom in When he was a boy, Einstein's father, Hermann, moved his family to Munich, where he and a brother opened a factory manufacturing electrical equipment. The family later moved to Milan, Italy, in , before Einstein had graduated from high school.
Einstein did not have a reputation as a brilliant or even an excellent student. He was regarded as rebellious, a young man who preferred to study topics in math and science that interested him and to ignore assignments that did not. He paid a price for his independent streak in , when the prestigious Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich rejected his application.
Einstein spent a year studying subjects in which he was considered weak. He was finally admitted to the Swiss university in with the intention of becoming a teacher of physics and math. Even then, Einstein did not impress all of his teachers. He graduated in and became a Swiss citizen, but he could not find a teaching job without the recommendation of all his teachers.
Instead, Einstein got a job working for the Swiss government, examining applications for patents. A patent is a claim by an inventor for the exclusive right, during a limited period of time, to use an invention to make money. Applications are examined to make sure the so-called invention really is new. Einstein's job required technical knowledge, but it is often represented as a low-grade clerical job.
It did not enjoy the prestige of a teaching post at a major university, but it did allow Einstein plenty of free time to work on his first love, which was physics, and to enjoy his marriage in to Mileva Maric of Hungary, a student Einstein had met at the Institute of Technology. The couple had two sons and were divorced in Einstein later married his widowed cousin, Elsa Einstein, whom he had known since he was a child.
The story of Albert Einstein is not one of a scientist working for years to develop a new explanation for the world he sees around him. To the contrary, just a few years out of Zurich, Einstein published a series of scientific papers in a single year——that permanently established his reputation as one of the modern world's great scientists on a par with Galileo Galilei — and Sir Isaac Newton — One of the papers Einstein published in was on the topic of what is called Einstein's "special theory of relativity.
The speed of an object, on the other hand, is relative to the observer. A car may seem to be moving at 30 miles an hour to someone standing still; to someone moving towards the first car at the same speed, the first car seems to be moving at 60 miles an hour. Einstein's theory said that regardless of whether an observer is moving toward or away from light, the speed of light is always approximately , miles per second.
Also in , Einstein published four other papers: on the effects of electric currents; the phenomenon of " Brownian motion " the random movement of microscopic particles suspended in liquids or gases, which Einstein realized could prove the existence of molecules and atoms too small to observe in the most powerful microscope ; the emission and absorption of light; and the inertia of energy inertia is the quality of matter that keeps objects at rest steady, or keeps objects in motion moving, until some other force acts on them.
Over the next decade, other physicists began analyzing and evaluating Einstein's work, and his reputation soared. Einstein, who had not been able to get a job teaching physics, became an international scientific celebrity. In , he became a professor of physics at the University of Zurich. Two years later, he became a professor at German University in Prague now capital of the Czech Republic , and the year after that he became a professor at his own school, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
In , the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin made Einstein a member of their influential society and invited him to become director of scientific research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. He accepted the offer and moved to Berlin, where he remained for the next nineteen years. Sir Isaac Newton , a pioneer in the study of the nature of objects and of objects in motion the science of physics , is often credited with "discovering" gravity, when an apple fell from a tree and hit his head.
Newton wrote extensively about gravity and its effect on objects. For over two hundred years, Newton was the recognized authority on the subject. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein challenged Newton's theories. In Einstein's views, things that might seem obvious to the observer are sometimes not. For example, the same clock might tick at a different speed when it is near a giant object, such as the Sun.
Light, which is thought to travel very fast , miles per second may also be affected by large objects. A second the unit of time might be longer or shorter, depending on gravity. In Einstein's view, it is all "relative. What was General Relativity? Einstein's earlier theory of time and space, Special Relativity, proposed that distance and time are not absolute.
The ticking rate of a clock depends on the motion of the observer of that clock; likewise for the length of a 'yard stick. The key idea of General Relativity, called the Equivalence Principle, is that gravity pulling in one direction is completely equivalent to an acceleration in the opposite direction. A car accelerating forwards feels just like sideways gravity pushing you back against your seat.
An elevator accelerating upwards feels just like gravity pushing you into the floor. If gravity is equivalent to acceleration, and if motion affects measurements of time and space as shown in Special Relativity , then it follows that gravity does so as well. In particular, the gravity of any mass, such as our sun, has the effect of warping the space and time around it.
For example, the angles of a triangle no longer add up to degrees and clocks tick more slowly the closer they are to a gravitational mass like the sun. Many of the predictions of General Relativity, such as the bending of starlight by gravity and a tiny shift in the orbit of the planet Mercury, have been quantitatively confirmed by experiment.
Einstein's theories are not easy to understand, and indeed he was not explaining events he had witnessed, as Newton did in developing his theory of gravitation. Einstein's theories were just that—ideas generated from his scientific imagination—until the observations of light being deflected during a solar eclipse behaved in exactly the way Einstein had predicted.
Scientists in other countries also admired his work. Their photographs confirmed one of Einstein's startling predictions: that beams of light could be "bent" or "deflected" when passing near a huge mass such as the Sun. Einstein Theory Triumphs. Two years later, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. Physics was not the only subject of interest to Einstein.
Far from being a remote professor uninformed about world events, Einstein was a pacifist, one who does not believe in participating in wars. From to , Europe experienced the most destructive, deadly war fought to that date, World War I. Rather than springing to the defense of his nation, Einstein insisted that it was morally wrong to fight in an army, an attitude that won him widespread criticism at home in Germany.
Einstein was also a strong supporter of Zionism, the idea that Jews deserved their own country situated in Palestine, the land of the Bible. Zionism became a political movement among European Jews starting in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, partly in reaction to continuing religious discrimination. In , the National Socialist Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler — won a majority in the German parliament, or legislature, after preaching intense hatred of Jews, whom the Nazis blamed for many of Germany's economic problems.
At the time of the election, Einstein and his wife were visiting the United States , and Einstein declared that he would not return to Germany. The scientist was immediately welcomed by other scientists in the United States. Einstein had already agreed to spend part of the year at a newly organized Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey ; he was then persuaded by Hitler's rise to power to work full—time at the institute.
In the world of science, Einstein's presence added immediate status to the new institute and was a loss to German scientists. Hitler, who a decade later launched the Holocaust, the mass murder of Jews and others he disapproved of, had based part of his political philosophy on the notion that Germans, as representatives of something he called the "Aryan" race, were superior to other peoples of the world and were therefore entitled to dominate others.
In Hitler's views, Jews were distinctly inferior. Of course, in the world of science, the existence of Albert Einstein was living evidence of the inaccuracy of Hitler's racist theory. During the s, Einstein wrote not only about science but also about politics. He frequently criticized the policies of Hitler in Germany and urged Western nations like the United States to oppose those policies.
In , after a breakthrough in physics in Germany, Einstein wrote a letter to U. Roosevelt —; served —45 urging government support for research into how to make a bomb using new discoveries about atoms. Einstein himself never participated in the research that resulted in the production of nuclear weapons , and he was shocked and horrified when the United States dropped two such bombs on Japan in August to end World War II —45 in the Pacific.
In later years, Einstein wrote essays on the desirability of a single world government that would, in effect, do away with individual nations.
Although Einstein was always able to attract attention simply on the strength of his name, most of his political ideas were largely ignored. Although Einstein continued working in the field of physics, his most important works had all been published by Thereafter, he was a revered figure in science, and he used his position to try to influence politics.
During the period of Nazi rule in Germany, Einstein was one of thousands of Jews who successfully fled the country to live elsewhere; an estimated eight million others were not so lucky: they perished in the Holocaust. Whether there were other Einsteins among them will never be known. Einstein retired from teaching in , although he continued work on his own.
In , Einstein turned down an offer to become the president of Israel. The scientist died in Princeton, New Jersey, in at the age of seventy-six. Einstein Lived Here. New York : Oxford University Press, Parker, Barry R. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, Swisher, Clarice, ed. Albert Einstein. San Diego : Greenhaven Press, Holton, Gerald. Oberbye, Dennis.
D1 Science Times. Lightman, Alan. Immigration and Migration Reference Library. Albert Einstein is generally regarded as the greatest theoretical physicist of the twentieth century, if not of all time. Modern physics bears his mark more than any other physicist. His Special Theory of Relativity changed our conceptions of space, time, motion, and matter, and his General Theory of Relativity was the first new theory of gravitation since Isaac Newton 's.
Yet his work went beyond the boundaries of physics as he engaged himself in the educational, cultural, and philosophical concerns of his generation.
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Less known is Einstein's interest and personal engagement in religious matters. In specific, he strongly opposed the proposition that science and religion are irreconcilable. Albert Einstein , whose ancestors had lived in southern Germany for many generations, was born on March 14, , in Ulm , Germany. In , the Einstein family moved to Munich , where Albert at the age of six was sent to a Catholic elementary school.
At home a distant relative introduced him to the principles of Judaism and evoked in him such a fervent religious sentiment, that he observed Jewish religious prescriptions and even chided his parents for eating pork. At age ten he entered the interdenominational Luitpold Gymnasium, where he excelled in mathematics and Latin. Ironically, his religious enthusiasm ended abruptly as the result of the only religious custom his parents observed, the hosting of a poor Jewish student for a weekly meal.
This beneficiary was Max Talmud, a medical student older than Albert by ten years. As Einstein, in his autobiographical notes, wrote, "through the reading of these books I reached the conclusion that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a fanatic freethinking. In , Albert's parents, for commercial reasons, moved to Italy.
Left alone and hating the authoritarian discipline at the Gymnasium, Albert joined his parents before finishing school. At the Swiss cantonal school in Aarau he obtained the diploma that enabled him to enroll in the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School ETH in Zurich, where he studied physics and mathematics and graduated in Unable to find a regular academic position, he supported himself by tutoring and part-time school teaching until June , when he obtained the appointment of technical expert third class at the patent office in Berne.
Little is known about their daughter Lieserl, who was born in before their marriage during Mileva's visit to her parents. Albert seems never to have seen her. Their first son, Hans Albert, was born in , and their second son, Eduard, in Einstein liked the job at the patent office because it was interesting and also left him time to pursue his own work in theoretical physics.
He already had a number of important publications, mostly on thermodynamics, to his credit. But the year became his annus mirabilis.
Biography of thomas alva edison: Albert Einstein (/ ˈ aɪ n s t aɪ n /, EYEN-styne; [4] German: [ˈalbɛʁt ˈʔaɪnʃtaɪn] ⓘ; 14 March – 18 April ) was a German-born theoretical physicist who is best known for developing the theory of relativity.
In April , less than four months before the outbreak of the First World War , he moved to Berlin with his wife and two sons to serve as university professor without teaching obligations and as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics. Mileva disliked Berlin and returned with the children to Zurich. In February Albert and Mileva got divorced.
Einstein detested the military enthusiasm that swept Germany after the declaration of war and courageously refused to sign the manisfesto, in which German intellectuals declared their solidarity with German militarism. Einstein continued his work on the general theory of relativity , which he had begun in In November , he derived the exact value of the perihelion precession of the planet Mercury, which for over sixty years had been an unresolved problem, and he predicted how much a ray of light, emitted by a star and grazing the sun, should be deflected by the gravitation of the sun.
In he applied general relativity to the study of the structure of the universe as a whole, raising thereby the status of cosmology, which theretofore had been a jumble of speculations, to that of a respectable scientific discipline. His prediction of the gravitational deflection of light was confirmed in by two British eclipse expeditions to West Africa and Brazil.
When their results were announced in London, Einstein's theory was hailed by the President of the Royal Society as "perhaps the greatest achievement in the history of human thought. In , he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics. But when the Nazi terror began in Germany, he, as a Jew and pacifist, and his theory, became the target of brute attacks.
At Adolf Hitler 's rise to power early in , Einstein was in Belgium and, instead of returning to Germany, accepted a professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey , where he remained until his death on April 18, During the twenty-two years in Princeton he resumed his work on quantum theory. Although he was one of its founding fathers, he rejected its generally accepted probabilistic interpretation because, influenced by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza — , whom he had read in his youth, he was utterly convinced of the causal dependence of all phenomena.
Nor did he accept the prevailing view that the concept of a physical phenomenon includes irrevocably the specifics of the experimental conditions of its observation. For him "physics is an attempt conceptually to grasp reality as it is thought independently of its being observed" Schlipp, p. His famous paper, written in collaboration with physicists Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolsky challenged the completeness of orthodox quantum mechanics and had far-reaching consequences debated still today.
But most of his time, until the day of his death, he devoted to the last great project of his life, the search for a unified field theory, which however remained unfinished. Apart from his scientific work Einstein, using his prestige, engaged himself in promoting the causes of social justice, civil liberty, tolerance, and equity of all citizens before the law.
He believed in the ideal of international peace and in the feasibility of establishing a world government, led by the superpowers, to which all nations should commit all their military resources. Although having signed in August the famous letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposing the development of an atomic bomb , he later admitted that, had he known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb , he "would not have lifted a finger.
Having been, during his later years in Berlin, a victim of anti-Semitic propaganda, and being aware of the cruel persecutions of Jews by the Nazis , Einstein most actively supported Zionism, which he regarded as a moral, not a political, movement to restore his people's dignity necessary to survive in a hostile world. When once, in this context, he declared: "I am glad to belong to the Jewish people, although I do not regard it as 'chosen'" Schlipp, p.
And when he said, as quoted above, that he later recanted his juvenile freethinking "because of a better insight into causal connections," he referred to his realization that science, by revealing a divine harmony in the universe expressed by the laws of nature, imbued him with a feeling of awe and humility that made him believe in a " God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.
In his Princeton years, Einstein wrote numerous articles and addresses on what he called his "cosmic religion" and protested strongly against the identification of his belief in an impersonal God with atheism. On December 31, , the well-known weekly newsmagazine Time proclaimed Albert Einstein "Person of the Century" on the grounds that he was not only the century's greatest scientist, who altered forever our views on matter, time, space, and motion, but also a humanitarian, who fought for the causes of justice and peace, and "had faith in the beauty of God's handiwork.
He only started to talk when he was three years old, but it is a myth that he was a poor student. What did evidence itself from the start was the single-mindedness that. He only applied himself when the subject held a strong interest for him. Science was such a preoccupation from early on in his life. When he was only one year old, the Einstein family relocated to Munich, where his father and an uncle went into business together.
In his father's factory, the young Einstein marveled at dynamos and other machinery. Two other events appear to have been crucial in awakening his interest in science. At the age of five, he was deeply impressed when his father showed him a compass. At the age of eleven, he discovered what he later called his "holy geometry book. In high school, the Gymnasium, he did extremely well in physics and mathematics but was undistinguished in subjects that were of no interest to him.
In his father's business in Munich failed, and the family went to Italy, leaving Einstein behind to complete his high-school education. Einstein, however, who had little tolerance for the rigid discipline of the Gymnasium, soon dropped out of school and joined his family in Milan. This way, he also avoided being drafted into the German military.
After completing his secondary education in Switzerland, he was eventually admitted to the Federal Polytechnic, now the ETH, in Zurich. There he met his first wife Mileva Maric — Einstein frequently skipped class, relying instead on the notes of his classmate Marcel Grossmann — , and spent most of his time studying by himself more recent physics than was covered in the university curriculum.
He thereby alienated some of his teachers, which was a factor in his failure to find an academic position upon graduation in In he finally got a job as a patent examiner third class in Bern. He had become a Swiss national the year before. He and Mileva married in , over the strong objections of his parents. Before they were married, Albert and Mileva had a daughter, Lieserl, who was given up for adoption.
No trace of her remains. They had two more children: Hans Albert — and Eduard — Einstein's approach in these papers was to work with what he later called "theories of principle. With uncompromising logic, he then derived the consequences of these generalizations, in the process exposing various preconceived notions as prejudices that had to be cast aside such as commonsense ideas about simultaneity.
Proceeding in a similar vein, Einstein established in that any satisfactory theory of light must combine aspects of both a wave and a particle theory.