Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

1879 Albert Einstein, an American physicist of German origin was born on the 14th of March at Ulm, Germany. He was son of Hermann, a Hebrew industrialist and of Paulina. He spent his youth at Munich, where his family owned a small shop that produced appliances. Even if he had not spoken until 3 years old, when he did it he had the vocabulary and the fluency of an adult. Since he was young, he was very interested in nature and had an innate ability to understand hard mathematical concepts.

1891 Being 12 years old, he learnt by himself Euclidean geometry. Einstein hated the routine and unimaginative spirit of the school in Munich. When the repeated failure of business determined his family to leave Germany and go to Milano, in Italy, Einstein, 15 years old, used the opportunity to give up to school. He spent one year with his parents at Milano and when he realized he had to go on by himself Einstein graduated high school in Arrau, Switzerland.

1896 He enrolled to Polytechnic in Zurich. He did not like teaching methods used here that is why he usually missed the classes using the entire time to study Physics by himself or to play his loved violin.

1902 He secured for him the position of examiner to Patent Office in Bern.

1903 He married to Mileva Maric, a former colleague to Polytechnic. They had two sons: the first became a mechanical engineering teacher and the second was schizophrenic. Einstein married again later.

1905 Einstein took his doctorate to University in Zurich with a theoretical dissertation on molecules size; he also published three scientific articles that were extremely important for the subsequent development of Physics during century XX. The first article, “About the Suspended Small Particles in an Immiscible Liquid”, statistically explained the movement of particles that are randomly distributed in a fluid. The second work, dedicated to photoelectric effect explanation, contained a revolutionary hypothesis regarding the light nature. Einstein considered that light could be considered an amount of particles on certain conditions and he also speculated that energy carried by any light particle, called photon, is proportionally to radiation frequency.

His third important work that was published by Einstein in 1905, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”, contained what would be known later as “relativity theory”. Since Newton, natural philosophers (name under which physicists and chemists were known) had tried to understand matter and radiation nature and also the way they interacted into a unified picture of the world. The idea that the laws of mechanic are essential was known as the mechanistic conception of the world, while the idea that electricity laws are fundamental was known as electromagnetic conception of the world.

In the spring of 1905, after he had reflected a lot to these problems, Einstein elaborated “special theory of relativity”. The essence of this theory was the finding that all time and space measurements depend on signals speed. The fastest signal is light.

The hardships the other savants had dealing with Einstein’s laws were not because his theories are complex from mathematical point of view or technically obscure; the problems rather derived from Einstein’s convictions on the nature of valid theories and on the relationship between experiment and theory.

The first that sustained him was the German physicist Max Planck. Einstein remained to Patent Office for four years after he had started to be famous within Physicists community.

1907 Even before leaving Patent Office, Einstein had started his work to expand and generalize relativity theory for all coordinate systems.

1909 His first academic job was at University in Zurich.

1911 He removed to German Language University in Prague.

1912 He returned to Polytechnic in Zurich.

1913 He was appointed director of Physics Institute in Berlin, “Kaiser Wilhem”.

1916 “Generalized Theory of Relativity” was published on its complete form. Based on this theory, Einstein justified the unexplained variations of the motion on planets orbit and he predicted starlight blending near a massive body, like the Sun. This year he also divorced.

1919 During solar eclipse this phenomenon sustained by Einstein was confirmed and became a media phenomenon.

1920 He got Nobel Award for Physics (because he had explained photoelectric effect).

1928 Einstein’s supremacy regarding Physics stopped because of quantum Physics development.

1933 Being a Jew his books were burnt by Hitlerites at Berlin and his fortune was seized. Einstein, who was a teacher in USA, had never gone back to Nazi Germany. Hitler’s ascension determined him to give up to pacifist beliefs and agreed atomic bomb building (but he did not take part in its construction).

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions, he became a fierce advocate of nuclear disarmament. In the same time, as a Jew, he rejected the proposal to become president of Israel, considering that he was a physicist not a politician. He married again, to his cousin, Elsa, who died in 1936.

1955 After a period of quiet and lonely life at Princeton, New Jersey, USA, great physicist Albert Einstein passed away.[1]

 

 

Bibliography:

    1. Albert Einstein (1879-1955), ro.biography.name