Albert Einstein Quick Fact
Albert Einstein was a German-born Nobel Prize-winning physicist. He is best known for his discovery of the theory of relativity and the law of mass-energy equivalence, E = mc². He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921.
Born : March 14, 189, Ulm, Germany
Died : April 17, 1955, Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center, New Jersey, USA
Spouse : Elsa Einstein (married 1919–1938), Mileva Merrick (married 1903–1919)
Education : University of Zurich (1905), ETH Zurich (1896–1900) ,
Albert Einstein Biography
Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955), a German-born theoretical physicist, developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics. He is known to the general public for his mass energy equivalence formula and recognized as{\displaystyle E=mc^{2}} “the world’s most famous equation”. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.
Einstein challenged the Newtonian mechanics as no longer enough to settle the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field and then he developed his theory of relativity and later on extended to gravitational fields on general relativity in with his theory of gravitation. In 1917, he applied the general theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe.
Children : Edward Einstein , Hans Albert Einstein , Lizarle Einstein
In 1905, he was awarded a PhD by the University of Zurich and published four revolutionary papers just at the age of 26. Einstein taught theoretical physics at Zurich between 1912 and 1914 and was elected to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until 1955 and died on this same year.
Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers and more than 150 non-scientific works. Due to intellectual achievements and originality he was called “genius” of all times
Albert Einstein’s Early personal life
Albert Einstein was born in Ulm in the German Empire, on 14 March 1879. His father was Hermann Einstein and mother was Pauline Koch. In 1880, the family moved to Munich. At the age of 8, he was transferred to the Luitpold Gymnasium and learned advanced primary and secondary school education until he left the German Empire seven years later.
In 1894, the Einstein family moved to Italy. In 1894, he travelled to Italy to join his family in Pavia and wrote a short essay named “On the Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field”.
Einstein always excelled at math and physics and used to be advanced among his classmates. At the age of 12, Einstein learned algebra and Euclidean geometry over a single summer all by himself. Einstein also independently discovered the Pythagorean theorem in his own way at age 12. Einstein started teaching himself calculus at 12, and as a 14-year-old he claimed he had grasped integral and differential calculus.
At age 13, Einstein went to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In 1895, at the age of 16, Einstein took the entrance examinations for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zürich.
Einstein married Maric in January 1903. In May 1904, their son Hans Albert Einstein was born in Switzerland. Their second son Eduard was born in Zürich in July 1910 and moved to Berlin in April 1914. They divorced on 14 February 1919..
Einstein married Elsa Löwenthal in 1919 after having a relationship with her since 1912. But unfortunately, Elsa was diagnosed with heart and kidney problems in 1935 and died in December 1936.
Academic career of Albert Einstein
By 1908, he became a leading scientist and was appointed lecturer at the University of Bern. The following year, after giving a lecture on electrodynamics and the relativity principle at the University of Zürich, Alfred Kleiner recommended him to the faculty for a newly created professorship in theoretical physics and also appointed as associate professor in 1909.
Einstein worked as a full professor at the German Charles Ferdinand University in Prague in April 1911 and accepted Austrian citizenship in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In July 1912, he returned to his alma mater in Zürich. From 1912 until 1914, he was professor of theoretical physics at the ETH Zurich and taught analytical mechanics and thermodynamics.
On 3 July 1913, he was chosen for membership in the Prussian Academy of Sciences and was officially elected to the academy on 24 July and accepted to move to the German Empire the next year.
In 1920, he became a Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1922, he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect”.
From 1922 to 1932, Einstein was a member of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations in Geneva. While at American universities in early 1933, he accepted his third two-month visiting professorship at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Death of Albert Einstein
On 17 April 1955, Einstein experienced internal bleeding due to rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm.
Einstein refused surgery with his wonderful thought of not depending on artificial help. He died in Princeton Hospital early the next morning at the age of 76. Einstein’s brain was removed for preservation without the permission of his family, in the hope that the neuroscience of the future would be able to discover what made Einstein so intelligent.
Scientific contribution of Albert Einstein
Einstein published hundreds of books and articles, more than 300 scientific papers and 150 non-scientific ones. On 5 December 2014, more than 30,000 unique documents by him were discovered all together.
- 1905 – Annus Mirabilis papers
The Annus Mirabilis papers are four articles pertaining to the photoelectric effect (which gave rise to quantum theory), Brownian motion, the special theory of relativity, and E = mc2 that Einstein published in the Annalen der Physik scientific journal in 1905.
- Thermodynamic fluctuations and statistical physics
Einstein’s first papersubmitted in 1900 to Annalen der Physik was on capillary attraction. It was published in 1901 with the title “Folgerungen aus den Capillaritätserscheinungen”, to interpret atomic phenomena from a statistical point of view.
- Theory of critical opalescence
Einstein returned to the problem of thermodynamic fluctuations, giving a treatment of the density variations in a fluid at its critical point. Einstein quantitatively derived critical opalescence from a treatment of density fluctuations, and demonstrated how both the effect and Rayleigh scattering originate from the atomistic constitution of matter.
- Special relativity
Einstein’s “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” was received on 30 June 1905 and published 26 September of that same year. It reconciled conflicts between Maxwell’s equations (the laws of electricity and magnetism) and the laws of Newtonian mechanics by introducing changes to the laws of mechanics.
- General relativity and the equivalence principle
General relativity (GR) is a theory of gravitation that was developed by Einstein between 1907 and 1915. According to general relativity, the observed gravitational attraction between masses results from the warping of space and time by those masses.
- Gravitational waves
In 1916, Einstein predicted gravitational waves ripples in the curvature of space time which propagate as waves, traveling outward from the source, transporting energy as gravitational radiation. The existence of gravitational waves is possible under general relativity due to its Lorentz invariance.
- Physical cosmology
In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to the structure of the universe as a whole. He discovered that the general field equations predicted a universe that was dynamic, either contracting or expanding.
- Energy momentum pseudotensor
Einstein argued that this is true for a fundamental reason: the gravitational field could be made to vanish by a choice of coordinates. He maintained that the non-covariant energy momentum pseudotensor was in fact the best description of the energy momentum distribution in a gravitational field.
- Wormholes
In 1935, Einstein collaborated with Nathan Rosen to produce a model of a wormhole, often called Einstein–Rosen bridges. His motivation was to model elementary particles with charge as a solution of gravitational field equations.
- Equations of motion
The theory of general relativity has a fundamental law—the Einstein field equations, which describe how space curves. The geodesic equation, which describes how particles move, may be derived from the Einstein field equations.
- Quantum mechanics
Einstein was displeased with modern quantum mechanics as it had evolved after 1925. It was Einstein himself, in his 1917 paper that proposed the possibility of stimulated emission, who first proposed the fundamental role of chance in explaining quantum processes. Einstein believed that a physical reality exists independent of our ability to observe it.
