Einstein Essay, Research Paper

Einstein?s early life;

Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany on Mar. 14, 1879. Einstein’s parents, who

were non observant Jews, moved from Ulm to Munich when Einstein was an infant. The

family business was the manufacture of electrical parts. When the business failed, in 1894,

the family moved to Milan, Italy. At this time Einstein decided officially to relinquish his

German citizenship. Within a year, still without having completed secondary school,

Einstein failed an examination that would have allowed him to take a course of study

leading to a diploma as an electrical engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

He spent the next year in nearby Aarau at the continual secondary school, where he

enjoyed excellent teachers. Einstein returned in 1896 to the Swiss Federal Institute of

Technology, where he graduated, in 1900 as a secondary school teacher of mathematics

and physics.

After two years he obtained a post at the Swiss patent office in Bern. The

patent-office work required Einstein’s careful attention, but while employed there he

completed an astonishing range of publications in theoretical physics. For the most part

these texts were written in his spare time and without the benefit of close contact with

either the scientific literature or theoretician colleagues. Einstein took one of his scientific

papers to the University of Zurich to obtain a Ph.D. degree in 1905. In 1908 he sent a

second paper to the University of Bern and became a lecturer there. The next year Einstein

received a regular appointment as associate professor of physics at the University of

Zurich.

By 1909, Einstein was recognized throughout German-speaking Europe as a

leading scientific thinker. In quick succession he held professorships at the German

University of Prague and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. In 1914 he

advanced to the best-paying post that a theoretical physicist could hold in central Europe,

professor at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft in Berlin. By the age of 35 he was

recognized as the best physicist in whole Europe.

Einstaen?s later life;

When British eclipse expeditions in 1919 confirmed his predictions about the

general theory of relativity, Einstein was bombarded by the popular press. Einstein’s

personal ethics also fired public imagination. Einstein, who after returning to Germany in

1914 did not reapply for German citizenship, was one of only a handful of German

professors who remained a pacifist and did not support Germany’s war aims. After the

war, when the victorious allies sought to exclude German scientists from international

meetings, Einstein–a Jew traveling with a Swiss passport–remained an acceptable

German envoy. Einstein’s political views as a pacifist and a Zionist pitted him against

conservatives in Germany, who branded him a traitor and a defeatist. The public success

accorded his theories of relativity evoked savage attacks in the 1920s by the anti-Semitic

physicists Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard, men who after 1932 tried to create a

so-called Aryan physics in Germany. Just how controversial the theories of relativity

remained for less flexibly minded physicists is revealed in the circumstances surrounding

Einstein’s reception of a Nobel Prize in 1921–awarded not for relativity but for his 1905

work on the photoelectric effect.

With the rise of fascism in Germany, Einstein moved, in 1933 to the United States

and abandoned his pacifism. He reluctantly agreed that the new menace had to be put

down through force of arms. In this context Einstein sent a letter, in 1939, to President

Franklin D. Roosevelt that urged that the United States proceed to develop an atomic

bomb before Germany did. The letter, composed by Einstein’s friend Leo Szilard, was one

of many exchanged between the White House and Einstein, and it contributed to

Roosevelt’s decision to fund what became the Manhattan Project.

As much he appeared to the public as a champion of unpopular causes, Einstein’s

central concerns always revolved around physics. At the age of 59, when other theoretical

physicists would long since have abandoned original scientific research, Einstein and his

co-workers Leopold Infeld and Banesh Hoffmann achieved a major new result in the

general theory of relativity.

Until the end of his life Einstein sought a unified field theory, whereby the

phenomena of gravitation and electromagnetism could be derived from one set of

equations. After 1920, however, while retaining relativity as a fundamental concept,

theoretical physicists focused more attention on the theory of quantum mechanics, as

elaborated by Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and others, and Einstein’s later

thoughts went somewhat neglected for decades. This picture has changed in more recent

years. Physicists are now striving to combine Einstein’s relativity theory with quantum

theory in a “theory of everything,” by means of such highly advanced mathematical models

as superstring theories.

I picked this man to write about because at first he started out normal and no one

tought that he will become one of the greathest minds in the world of all time. As a little

kid he couldn?t pass secondary school and later in his life he with some help from two

co-workers in the Manhattan project he created the the Atomic bomb. At the age of 26 he

forms the equation of energy: E=MC^2. On the next two pages is a timetable and

everything that Einstein did in his life.

1879: Albert Einstein is born to Hermann Einstein (a featherbedsalesman) and his wife

Pauline in Ulm, Germany.

1884: Around this time, Albert receives his first compass, beginning his quest to

investigate the natural world.

1889: At age 10, Albert sets into a program of self education andreads as much about

science as he can.

1894: The Einsteins move from Munich to Pavia, Italy andAlbert, 15, stays on in

Munichto finish the school year. Albert lasts only a term on his own and follows his family

to Pavia.

1895: Albert attempts to skip high school by taking an entrance exam to the Swiss

Polytechnic, a top technical university, but he

fails the arts portion. His family sends him to the Swiss town of Aarau to finish high

school.

1896: Albert graduates from high school at the age of 17 and enrolls at the ETH (the

Federal Polytechnic) in Zurich.

1898: Albert falls in love with Mileva Maric, a Hungarian classmate at the ETH.

1900: Albert graduates from the ETH.

1901: Albert becomes a Swiss citizen. Unemployed, he searches for work. He and Mileva

meet in northern Italy for a tryst. Mileva becomes pregnant. In the fall, Albert finds work

in Schaffhausen, Switzerland as a tutor. Mileva, visibly pregnant, moves to Stein Am

Rhein, three miles upriver. Mileva then moves to Hungary to give birth to their baby at her

parent’s home. Albert moves to Bern.

1902: In January, Mileva gives birth to their daughter, Lieserl, whom they eventually put

up for adoption. She reportedly becomes ill and then all record of her disappears. Albert

takes a job at the Swiss Patent Office. Hermann Einstein becomes ill and dies.

1903: Albert and Mileva marry in January

1904: Mileva gives birth to their first son, Hans Albert.

1905: “Annus Mirabilis” — Einstein’s “Miracle Year”: his Special theory of Relativity is

born. June 30th, Einstein, submits his paper, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”

to the leading German physics journal. At age 26, he applies his theory to mass and energy

and formulates the equation e=mc2.

1906: Still living in Bern, Einstein continues as an Examiner at the Swiss Patent Office.

1907: Einstein begins applying the laws of gravity to his Special Theory of Relativity.

1910: Son Eduard is born.

1911: The Einsteins move to Prague where Albert is given a full professorship at the

German University there. Albert is the youngest to attend the invitation-only Solvay

Conference in Brussels, the first world physics conference.

1912: The Einstein?s move to Zurich where Albert is given a position as a professor of

Theoretical Physics at the ETH.

1913: Einstein works on his new Theory of Gravity.

1914: Einstein becomes director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and professor of

theoretical physics at the University of Berlin. The family moves there in April, but Mileva

and the sons return to Zurich after 3 months. The divorce prodeedings begin.In August,

World War I begins.

1915: Einstein completes the General Theory of Relativity.

1917: Einstein collapses and, near death, falls seriously ill. He is nursed back to health by

his cousin, Elsa. He publishes his first paper on cosmology.

1919: Albert marries Elsa. May 29, a solar eclipse proves Einstein?s General Theory of

Relativity works.

1922: Is awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for 1921.

1927: Attends fifth Solvay Conference and begins developing the foundation of quantum

mechanics with Bohr.

1928: Einstein begins pursing his idea of a unified field theory.

1932: Einstein is 53 and at the height of his fame. Identified as a Jew, he begins to feel the

heat of Nazi Germany.

1933: Albert and Elsa set sail for the United States. They settle in Princeton, New Jersey

where he assumes a post at the Institute for Advanced Study.

1936: Elsa dies after a brief illness.

1939: World War II begins. Einstein writes a famous letter to President Franklin D.

Roosevelt warning of the possibility of Germany?s building an atomic bomb and urging

nuclear research.

1940: Einstein becomes an American citizen; retains Swiss citizenship.

1949: Mileva dies.

1955: Einstein dies of heart failure on April 16.

Albert Einstain