Albert Einstein

Biography from Sara Grdan
Einstein's influence on the culture of our time by Jake Sanders

From Sara Grdan

EINSTEIN, Albert (1879-1955). Any list of the greatest thinkers in history contains the name of the brilliant physicist Albert Einstein. His theories of relativity led to entirely new ways of thinking about time, space, matter, energy, and gravity. Einstein's work led to such scientific advances as the control of atomic energy and to some of the investigations of space currently being made by astrophysicists.

Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, on March 14, 1879, of Jewish parents. He was a shy and curious child. He attended a Munich elementary school where he showed an interest in science and mathematics. He finished high school and technical college in Switzerland. At age 22 he became a Swiss citizen. In 1903 he married Mileva Marec. They had two sons but were later divorced. He married his cousin in 1919.

In 1902 Einstein became an examiner in the Swiss patent office at Bern. In 1905, at age 26, he published five major research papers in an important German physics journal. He received a doctorate for the first paper. Publication of the next four papers forever changed mankind's view of the universe. The first one provided a theory explaining Brownian movement, the zigzag motion of microscopic particles in suspension (see Colloid). Einstein suggested that the movement was caused by the random motion of molecules of the suspension medium as they bounced against the suspended particles.

A second paper laid the foundation for the photon, or quantum, theory of light. In it he proposed that light is composed of separate packets of energy, called quanta or photons, that have some of the properties of particles and some of the properties of waves. The paper redefined the theory of light. It also explained the photoelectric effect, the emission of electrons from some solids when they are struck by light. Television and other inventions are practical applications of Einstein's discoveries (see Energy; Light; Photoelectric Device).

A third paper, which had its beginnings in an essay at age 16, contained the "special theory of relativity." Einstein showed that time and motion are relative to the observer, if the speed of light is constant and natural laws are the same everywhere in the universe (see Relativity). This paper introduced an entirely new concept.

The fourth paper was a mathematical addition to the special theory of relativity. Here Einstein presented his famous formula, E = mc², known as the energy mass equivalence. What it says is that the energy (E) inherent in a mass (m) equals the mass multiplied by the velocity of light squared (c²). The formula shows that a small particle of matter is the equivalent of an enormous quantity of energy. These papers won Einstein a place among Europe's most respected physicists.

In 1916 Einstein published his general theory of relativity. In it he proposed that gravity is not a force, a previously accepted theory, but a curved field in the space-time continuum that is created by the presence of mass (see Astronomy).

Between 1909 and 1912 Einstein taught theoretical physics in Switzerland and Germany. He returned to Zurich to teach from 1912 to 1914. Worldwide fame came in 1919 when the Royal Society of London announced that predictions made in his general theory of relativity had been confirmed.

This happened when a scientific expedition in the Gulf of Guinea photographed the solar eclipse of May 29 of that year. Although he was awarded the 1921 Nobel prize for physics, the prize did not refer to his relativity theories, which were still considered to be controversial.

Einstein spoke out frequently against nationalism, the exalting of one nation above all others. He opposed war and violence and supported Zionism, the movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they denounced his ideas, seized his property, and burned his books. That year he moved to the United States. In 1940 he became an American citizen.

Beginning in the 1920s Einstein tried to establish a mathematical relationship between electromagnetism and gravitation. He spent the rest of his life on this unsuccessful attempt to explain all of the properties of matter and energy in a single mathematical formula.

In 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II in Europe, Einstein learned that two German chemists had split the uranium atom. Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist who lived in the United States, proposed that a chain-reaction splitting of uranium atoms could release enormous quantities of energy. In 1939 Einstein wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him that this scientific knowledge could lead to Gerrnany's developing an atomic bomb. He suggested that the United States prepare for its own atomic bomb research. Out of this effort came the Manhattan Project, in which the first two atomic bombs were developed in 1945 (see Nuclear Energy). Einstein died in Princeton, N.J., on April 18, 1955.

Einstein's influence on the culture of our time
By Jake Sanders

Born 14, 1879 in Ulm, Germany. Speech developed very late. Was promised a baby to play with, when sis was born he asked "Where are the wheels?" Didn't play sports. He was Jewish in an overwhelming Catholic class. He played the violin. He loved smoking a pipe. Died 1955.

Science

Within physics, there was no immediate recognition of the transforming nature of his work. Six years elapsed before the first publication of the theory of relativity became sufficient enough to merit a textbook and now the imprint of Einstein's work on different areas of physical science is so large and varied that a scientist who tries to trace it would be hard put to know where to start. A modern dictionary of scientific terms contains thirty-five entries bearing his name, from "Einstein: A unit of light energy used in photochemistry" and "Einstein-Bose statistics" to "Einstein tensor" and "Einstein viscosity equation." Many decades after his death, there is in many branches of the physical sciences more awareness of his generative role than would have been credited during the last twenty years of his life. His ideas became essential for laying out conceptual paths for contemporary work in astronomy or cosmology, in unifying gravitation with the quantum field theory of gauge fields, or even for understanding new observations that were not possible in his time but were predicted by him (as in his 1936 paper which deduced that the gravitational effect of galaxies should act like optical tense on light).

Visual Arts

Einstein's ideas and opinions caused remarkable and sometimes quite unforeseen cultural transformation and resonances. In the visual arts he protested when he could and, as so often, without effect. One art historian submitted to him a draft of an essay entitled "Cubism and the Theory of Relatively," which argued for such a connection--for example, that in both fields "attention was paid to relationships, and allowance was made for the simultaneity of several views." Politely but firmly, Einstein tried to put him straight, and he explained the difference between physical relatively and vulgar relatively so succinctly as to invite an extensive quotation:

As to the superposition of different aspects of an object on a canvas, that had been done for a long time; thus the eighteenth-century Italian painter Canaletto drew various parts of a set of buildings from different places and merged them into a combined view on the painting (for example, in Campo S.S. Giovanni e Paolo).
It was therefore doubly wrong to invoke him as an authority in support of the widespread misunderstanding that the physical understanding of relativity meant that all frameworks, points of view, narrators, fragments of plot, or thematic elements are created equal, that each of the polyphonic reports and contrasting perceptions is as valid or expedient as any other, and that all of these things, when piled together or juxtaposed, Rashomon-like, somehow constitute the real truth. If anything, twentieth-century relativistic physics has taught the contrary: that under certain conditions we can extract from different reports, or even from the report originating in one frame properly identified, all the laws of physics, each applicable in any framework, each having therefore an invariant meaning, that one does not depend on the accident of which frame one inhabits. It is for this reason that, by comparison with classical physics, modern relativity is simple, universal, and, one may even say. "absolute." The cliche became, erroneously, "everything is relative"; whereas the point is that out of a vast flux one can distill the very opposite: "some things are invariant."
The cost of the terminological confusion has been so great that a brief elaboration on this point will be relevant. Partly because he saw himself as a continuist rather than as an iconoclast, Einstein was reluctant to present this new work as a new theory. The term "relativity theory," which made the confusion in the long run more likely, was imposed on Einstein's early work by Planck and Abraham in 1906. For a time Einstein referred to it in print as the "so-called relativity theory," and until 1911 he avoided using the term altogether in the titles of his papers on the subject. In his correspondence Einstein seemed happier with the term Invariantentheorie, which is of course much more true to its method and aim. How much nonsense we might have been spared if Einstein had adopted that term, even with all its shortcomings ! To a correspondent who suggested such a change, Einstein replied (letter to E. Zschimmer, 30 September 1921): "Now to the name relativity theory. I admit that it is unfortunate, and has given occasion to philosophical misunderstanding.... The description you proposed would perhaps be better; but I believe it would cause confusion to change the generally accepted name after all this time.