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Albert Einstein
Life Details
Born: March 14th 1879. Died: April 18th 1955.
Introduction
Albert Einstein is a popular figure in modern day pop culture. In the UK he has been appearing in Smart Meter adverts (a likeness), but he was famous as a German scientist that gave us several physics laws and theories.
Early Life
Albert Einstein was born to Jewish parents; his mother was a homemaker and his father ran a successful electrochemical plant. He had a younger sister, who was a Romanist (studies of romance).
Two major components of Einstein's early life were a compass he had as a 5-year old, where he found out about invisible forces and then as a 12-year old where he got given a book of geometry, which he later called his "sacred little geometry book". This led him to learn complex mathematics, and outshine his then teacher of the subject.
Moving around the world at times (he moved to Munich, Milan, Switzerland, Berlin and then to New Jersey in his early life), Einstein kept learning maths and physics, and in 1905 was able to publish four groundbreaking documents that outlined the theories of special relativity, the Brownian motion, the theory of photoelectric effect and the mass-energy equivalence. This was to be his miracle year, and continued his work on these four theories to create what we know of modern physics. He proved these theories to be true, and further enhanced Sir Isaac Newton's theory on gravitational forces.
Other Works
Einstein also worked on opening a new type of physics - cosmology. His work explained that the universe was either expanding or contracting, which at the time contradicted what other scientists were thinking. These theories were backed up in 1929 when Edwin Hubble proved this theory was true, and it was indeed expanding.
The works done by Albert Einstein gained him worldwide recognition and popularity, which drew in attention from Nazi Germany at the beginning of the Second World War. Einstein left Germany in 1932, owing to pressures that he did not stand with what was happening with the of Nazi power.
He moved to New Jersey, where he enrolled with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He stayed in America and became a full US citizen in 1940. The 1930s were a hard decade for Einstein: his son Eduard was institutionalised for the rest of his life after developing schizophrenia. His best physicist friend who helped him with his theory of general relativity, Paul Ehrenfest, committed suicide, and his wife, Elsa, died in 1936.
With the onset of World War Two, Einstein told the powers that be in the US to seriously investigate the theory of atomic research, and the likelihood of an atomic bomb, despite his pacifist feelings, as the Nazis had begun their research earlier. With Einstein's equation of E = mc², it was discovered that splitting the Uranium atom might provide enough energy for a bomb. The Manhattan Project was the result of research undertaken by the Americans.
Albert Einstein was revolutionary in his theories, and provided much of today's modern physics, although his later works were debunked, and he moved out of the limelight.
