Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 - April 18, 1955) was a German-born American Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist widely regarded as the most important scientist of the 20th century and one of the greatest physicists of all time. He played a leading role in formulating the special and general theories of relativity; moreover, he made significant contributions to quantum theory and statistical mechanics. While best known for his Theory of Relativity (and specifically mass-energy equivalence, E=mc²), he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect in 1905 (his wonderful year) and for his services to Theoretical Physics.
After British solar eclipse expeditions in 1919 reported confirmation that light rays from distant stars were deflected by the gravity of the Sun in the amount he had predicted in his theory of relativity, Einstein became world-famous, an unusual achievement for a scientist. The London Times ran the headline on November 7, 1919: Revolution in science - New theory of the Universe - Newtonian ideas overthrown. In popular culture, his name has become synonymous with great intelligence and genius.
Youth and College
 Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, around 11:30 AM LMT, in the city of Ulm in Wurttemberg, Germany, about 100 km east of Stuttgart. His father was Hermann Einstein, a salesman who later ran an electrochemical works, and his mother was Pauline, nee Koch. They were married in Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt. Albert's family members were all non-observant Jews and he attended a Catholic elementary school. At the insistence of his mother, he was given violin lessons. Though he initially disliked the lessons, and eventually discontinued them, he would later take great solace in Mozart's violin sonatas.
When Einstein was five, his father showed him a pocket compass, and Einstein realized that something in "empty" space acted upon the needle; he would later describe the experience as one of the most revelatory events of his life. He built models and mechanical devices for fun and showed great mathematical ability early on.
In 1889, a medical student named Max Talmud (later: Talmey) introduced Einstein to key science and philosophy texts, including Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Two of his uncles would further foster his intellectual interests during his late childhood and early adolescence by recommending and providing books on science, mathematics and philosophy.
Einstein attended the Luitpold Gymnasium, where he received a relatively progressive education. He began to learn mathematics around age twelve; in 1891, he taught himself Euclidean plane geometry from a school booklet and began to study calculus. While at the Gymnasium, he clashed with authority and resented the school regimen, believing that the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in such endeavors as strict memorization.
In 1894, following the failure of Hermann Einstein's electrochemical business, the Einsteins moved from Munich to Pavia, a city in Italy near Milan. Einstein's first scientific work, called The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields, was written contemporaneously. Albert remained behind in Munich lodgings to finish school, completing only one term before leaving the gymnasium in the spring of 1895 to rejoin his family in Pavia. He quit a year and a half prior to final examinations without telling his parents, convincing the school to let him go with a medical note from a friendly doctor, but this meant that he had no secondary-school certificate. That year, at the age of 16, he performed the thought experiment known as Albert Einstein's mirror. After gazing into a mirror, he examined what would happen to his image if he were moving at the speed of light; his conclusion, that the speed of light is independent of the observer, would later become one of the two postulates of special relativity.
Although he excelled in the mathematics and science part of entrance examinations for the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, today the ETH Zurich, his failure of the liberal arts portion was a setback; his family sent him to Aarau, Switzerland to finish secondary school, and it became clear that he was not going to be an electrical engineer as his father intended for him. There, he studied the seldom-taught Maxwell's electromagnetic theory and received his diploma in September 1896. During this time, he lodged with Professor Jost Winteler's family and became
enamored with Marie, their daughter and his first sweetheart. Einstein's sister, Maja, who was perhaps his closest confidant, was to later marry their son, Paul, and his friend, Michele Besso, married their other daughter, Anna. Einstein subsequently enrolled at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in October and moved to Zurich, while Marie moved to Olsberg, Switzerland for a teaching post. The same year, he renounced his Württemberg citizenship and became stateless.
In the spring of 1896, the Serbian Mileva Maric started initially as a medical student at the University of Zurich, but after a term switched to the Federal Polytechnic Institute to study as the only woman that year for the same diploma as Einstein. Maric's relationship with Einstein developed into romance over the next few years.
In 1900, Einstein was granted a teaching diploma by the Federal Polytechnic Institute. Einstein then published his first paper, on the capillary forces of a drinking straw, titled
Consequences of the observations of capillarity phenomena (found in Annalen der Physik volume 4, page 513). In it, he tried to unify the laws of physics, an attempt he would continually make throughout his life. Through his friend Michele Besso, an engineer, Einstein was presented with the works of Ernst Mach, and would later consider him the best sounding board in Europe for physical ideas. During this time, Einstein discussed his scientific interests with a group of close friends, including Besso and Maric. The men referred to themselves as the Olympia Academy. Einstein and Maric had a daughter out of wedlock, Lieserl Einstein, born in January 1902. Her fate is unknown; some believe she died in infancy, while others believe she was given out for adoption.
Works and Doctorate
 Einstein could not find a teaching post upon graduation, mostly because his brashness as a young man had apparently irritated most of his professors. The father of a classmate helped him obtain employment as a technical assistant examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in 1902. There, Einstein judged the worth of inventors' patent applications for devices that required a knowledge of physics to understand - in particular he was chiefly charged to evaluate patents relating to electromagnetic devices. He also learned how to discern the essence of applications despite sometimes poor descriptions, and was taught by the director how to express [him]self correctly. He occasionally rectified their design errors while evaluating the practicality of their work.
Einstein married Mileva Maric on January 6, 1903. Einstein's marriage to Maric, who was a mathematician, was both a personal and intellectual partnership: Einstein referred to Mileva as a creature who is my equal and who is as strong and independent as I am. Ronald W. Clark, a biographer of Einstein, claimed that Einstein depended on the distance that existed in his and Mileva's marriage in order to have the solitude necessary to accomplish his work; he required intellectual isolation. Abram Joffe, a Soviet physicist who knew Einstein, in an obituary of Einstein, wrote, The author of [the papers of 1905] was ... a bureaucrat at the Patent Office in Bern, Einstein-Mari and this has recently been taken as evidence of a collaborative relationship. However, according to Alberto A. Martinez of the Center for Einstein Studies at Boston University, Joffe only ascribed authorship to Einstein, as he believed that it was a Swiss custom at the time to append the spouse's last name to the husband's name. Whatever the truth, the extent of her influence on Einstein's work is a highly controversial and debated question.
In 1903, Einstein's position at the Swiss Patent Office had been made permanent, though he was passed over for promotion until he had fully mastered machine technology. He obtained his doctorate at the University of Zurich after submitting his thesis A new determination of molecular dimensions in 1905.
That same year, in his spare time, he wrote four articles that participated in the foundation of modern physics, without much scientific literature to which he could refer or many scientific colleagues with whom he could discuss the theories. Most physicists agree that three of those papers (on Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, and special relativity) deserved Nobel Prizes. Only the paper on the photoelectric effect would be mentioned by the Nobel committee in the award. The reason for this was that at the time of the award, the photoelectric effect had the most unchallenged experimental evidence behind it, although the Nobel committee expressed the opinion that Einstein's other work would be confirmed in due course.
Some might regard the award for the photoelectric effect ironic, not only because Einstein is far better-known for relativity, but also because the photoelectric effect is a quantum phenomenon, and Einstein became somewhat disenchanted with the path quantum theory would take.
Annus Mirabilis Papers
Einstein submitted this series of papers to the Annalen der Physik. They are commonly referred to as the Annus Mirabilis Papers (from Annus mirabilis, Latin for year of wonders). The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) commemorated the 100th year of the publication of Einstein's extensive work in 1905 as the World Year of Physics 2005.
The first paper, named On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light, was specifically cited for his Nobel Prize. In this paper, Einstein extends Planck's hypothesis of discrete energy elements to his own hypothesis that electromagnetic energy is absorbed or emitted by matter in quanta of hv (where h is Planck's constant and v is the frequency of the light), proposing a new law to account for the photoelectric effect, as well as other properties of photoluminescence and
photo ionization. In later papers, Einstein used this law to describe the Volta effect (1906), the production of secondary cathode rays (1909) and the high-frequency limit of Bremsstrahlung (1911). Einstein's key contribution is his assertion that energy quantization is a general, intrinsic property of light, rather than a particular constraint of the interaction between matter and light, as Planck believed. Another, often overlooked result of this paper was Einstein's excellent estimate (6.171023) of Avogadro's number (6.021023). However, Einstein does not propose that light is a particle in this paper; the photon concept was not proposed until 1909.
His second article in 1905, named On the Motion - Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat - of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid, covered his study of Brownian motion, and provided empirical evidence for the existence of atoms. Before this paper, atoms were recognized as a useful concept, but physicists and chemists hotly debated whether atoms were real entities. Einstein's statistical discussion of atomic behavior gave experimentalists a way to count atoms by looking through an ordinary microscope. Wilhelm Ostwald, one of the leaders of the anti-atom school, later told Arnold Sommerfeld that he had been converted to a belief in atoms by Einstein's complete explanation of Brownian motion. Brownian motion was also explained by Louis Bachelier in 1900.
Einstein's third paper that year, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, was published in June 1905. This paper introduced the special theory of relativity, a theory of time, distance, mass and energy which was consistent with electromagnetism, but omitted the force of gravity. While developing this paper, Einstein wrote to Mileva about our work on relative motion, and this has led some to ask whether Mileva played a part in its development. A few historians of science believe that Einstein and his wife were both aware that the famous Frenchman Henri Poincare had already published the equations of Relativity, a few weeks before Einstein submitted his paper; most believe their work was independent. Similarly, it's debatable if he knew the 1904 paper of Lorentz which contained most of the theory and to which Poincare referred.
In a fourth paper, Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?, published late in 1905, he showed that from relativity's axioms, it is possible to deduce the famous equation which shows the equivalence between matter and energy. The energy equivalence (E) of some amount of mass (m) is that mass times the speed of light (c) squared: E = mc².
However, it was Poincare who in 1900 published the energy equation in slightly different form, namely as: m=E/c2.
Middle Years
In 1906, Einstein was promoted to technical examiner second class. In 1908, Einstein was licensed in Bern, Switzerland, as a Privatdozent (unsalaried teacher at a university). During this time, Einstein described why the sky is blue in his paper on the phenomenon of critical opalescence, which shows the cumulative effect of scattering of light by individual molecules in the atmosphere. In 1911, Einstein became first associate professor at the University of Zurich, and shortly afterwards full professor at the German language-section of the Charles University of Prague. While at Prague, Einstein published a paper calling on astronomers to test two predictions of his developing theory of relativity: a bending of light in a gravitational field, measurable at a solar eclipse; and a
red shift of solar spectral lines relative to spectral lines produced on Earth's surface. A young German astronomer, Erwin Freundlich, began collaborating with Einstein and alerted other astronomers around the world about Einstein's astronomical tests. In 1912, Einstein returned to Zurich in order to become full professor at the ETH Zurich. At that time, he worked closely with the mathematician Marcel Grossmann, who introduced him to Riemannian geometry. In 1912, Einstein started to refer to time as the fourth dimension (although H G Wells had done this earlier, in 1895 in The Time Machine).
In 1914, just before the start of World War I, Einstein settled in Berlin as professor at the local university and became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He took Prussian citizenship. From 1914 to 1933, he served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin. He also held the position of extraordinary professor at the University of Leiden from 1920 until 1946, where he regularly gave guest lectures.
In 1917, Einstein published On the Quantum Mechanics of Radiation. This article introduced the concept of stimulated emission, the physical principle that allows light amplification in the laser. He also published a paper that year that used the general theory of relativity to model the behavior of the entire universe, setting the stage for modern cosmology. In this work he created his self-described worst blunder, the cosmological constant.
On May 14, 1904, Albert and Mileva's first son, Hans Albert Einstein, was born. Their second son, Eduard Einstein, was born on July 28, 1910. Hans Albert became a professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, having little interaction with his father, but sharing his love for sailing and music. Eduard, the younger brother, intended to practice as a Freudian analyst but was institutionalized for schizophrenia and died in an asylum. Einstein divorced Mileva on February 14, 1919, and married his cousin Elsa Lowenthal (born Einstein: Lowenthal was the surname of her first husband, Max) on June 2, 1919. Elsa was Albert's first cousin (maternally) and his second cousin (paternally). She was three years older than Albert, and had nursed him to health after he had suffered a partial nervous breakdown combined with a severe stomach ailment; there were no children from this marriage.
General Relativity
In November 1915, Einstein presented a series of lectures before the Prussian Academy of Sciences in which he described his theory of gravity, known as general relativity. The final lecture ended with his introduction of an equation that replaced Newton's law of gravity, the Field Equation. This theory considered all observers to be equivalent, not only those moving at a uniform speed. In general relativity, gravity is no longer a force (as it is in Newton's law of gravity) but is a consequence of the curvature of space-time.
Einstein's published papers on general relativity were not available outside of Germany due to the war. News of Einstein's new theory reached English-speaking astronomers in England and America via Dutch physicists Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Paul Ehrenfest and their colleague Willem de Sitter, Director of Leiden Observatory. Arthur Stanley Eddington in England, who was Secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society, asked de Sitter to write a series of articles in English for the benefit of astronomers. He was fascinated with the new theory and became a leading proponent and
popularizer of relativity. Most astronomers did not like Einstein's geometrization of gravity and believed that his light bending and gravitational
red shift predictions would not be correct. In 1917 astronomers at Mt. Wilson Observatory in southern California published results of spectroscopic analysis of the solar spectrum that seemed to indicate that there was no gravitational
red shift in the sun. In 1918, astronomers at Lick Observatory in northern California obtained photographs at a solar eclipse visible in the United States. After the war ended, they announced results claiming that Einstein's general relativity prediction of light bending was wrong; but they never published their results due to large probable errors.
During a solar eclipse in 1919, Arthur Eddington supervised measurements of the bending of star light as it passed close to the Sun, resulting in star positions appearing further away from the Sun. This effect is called gravitational lensing and amounts to twice the Newtonian prediction. The observations were carried out in Sobral, Ceara, Brazil, as well as on the island of Principe, at the west coast of Africa. Eddington announced that the results confirmed Einstein's prediction and The Times reported that confirmation on November 7 of that year, thus cementing Einstein's fame.
Many scientists were still unconvinced for various reasons ranging from the scientific (disagreement with Einstein's interpretation of the experiments, belief in the ether or that an absolute frame of reference was necessary) to the psycho-social (conservatism, anti-Semitism). In Einstein's view, most of the objections were from experimentalists with very little understanding of the theory involved. Einstein's public fame which followed the 1919 article created resentment among these scientists some of which lasted well into the 1930s.
On March 30, 1921, Einstein went to New York to give a lecture on his new Theory of Relativity, the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Though he is now most famous for his work on relativity, it was for his earlier work on the photoelectric effect that he was given the Prize, as his work on general relativity was still disputed. The Nobel committee decided that citing his less-contested theory in the Prize would gain more acceptance from the scientific community.
Final Years
In 1948, Einstein served on the original committee which resulted in the founding of Brandeis University. A portrait of Einstein was taken by Yousuf Karsh on February 11 of that same year. In 1952, the Israeli government proposed to Einstein that he take the post of second president. He declined the offer, and is believed to be the only United States citizen ever to have been offered a position as a foreign head of state. On March 30, 1953, Einstein released a revised unified field theory.
He died at 1:15 AM in Princeton hospital in Princeton, New Jersey, on April 18, 1955 at the age of 76 from internal bleeding, which was caused by the rupture of an aortic aneurism, leaving the Generalized Theory of Gravitation unsolved. The only person present at his deathbed, a hospital nurse, said that just before his death he mumbled several words in German that she did not understand. He was cremated without ceremony on the same day he died at Trenton, New Jersey, in accordance with his wishes. His ashes were scattered at an undisclosed location.
An autopsy was performed on Einstein by Dr Thomas Stoltz Harvey, who removed and preserved his brain. Harvey found nothing unusual with his brain, but in 1999 further analysis by a team at McMaster University revealed that his parietal operculum region was missing and, to compensate, his inferior parietal lobe was 15% wider than normal. The inferior parietal region is responsible for mathematical thought, visuospatial cognition, and imagery of movement. Einstein's brain also contained 73% more glial cells than the average brain.
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