Born on March 14, 1879, in the southern German city of Ulm, Albert Einstein grew
up in a middle-class Jewish family in Munich. As a child, Einstein became
fascinated by music (he played the violin), mathematics and science. He dropped out
of school in 1894 and moved to Switzerland, where he resumed his schooling and
later gained admission to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich. In
1896, he renounced his German citizenship, and remained officially stateless before
becoming a Swiss citizen in 1901.
While working at the patent office, Einstein did some of the most creative work of
his life, producing no fewer than four groundbreaking articles in 1905 alone. In
the first paper, he applied the quantum theory (developed by German physicist Max
Planck) to light in order to explain the phenomenon known as the photoelectric
effect, by which a material will emit electrically charged particles when hit by
light. The second article contained Einstein’s experimental proof of the existence
of atoms, which he got by analyzing the phenomenon of Brownian motion, in which
tiny particles were suspended in water.
Einstein continued working at the patent office until 1909, when he finally found a
full-time academic post at the University of Zurich. In 1913, he arrived at the
University of Berlin, where he was made director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
for Physics. The move coincided with the beginning of Einstein’s romantic
relationship with a cousin of his, Elsa Lowenthal, whom he would eventually marry
after divorcing Mileva. In 1915, Einstein published the general theory of
relativity, which he considered his masterwork. This theory found that gravity, as
well as motion, can affect time and space. According to Einstein’s equivalence
principle–which held that gravity’s pull in one direction is equivalent to an
acceleration of speed in the opposite direction–if light is bent by acceleration,
it must also be bent by gravity. In 1919, two expeditions sent to perform
experiments during a solar eclipse found that light rays from distant stars were
deflected or bent by the gravity of the sun in just the way Einstein had predicted.
The general theory of relativity was the first major theory of gravity since
Newton’s, more than 250 years before, and the results made a tremendous splash
worldwide, with the London Times proclaiming a “Revolution in Science” and a “New
Theory of the Universe.” Einstein began touring the world, speaking in front of
crowds of thousands in the United States, Britain, France and Japan. In 1921, he
won the Nobel Prize for his work on the photoelectric effect, as his work on
relativity remained controversial at the time. Einstein soon began building on his
theories to form a new science of cosmology, which held that the universe was
dynamic instead of static, and was capable of expanding and contracting.
A longtime pacifist and a Jew, Einstein became the target of hostility in Weimar
Germany, where many citizens were suffering plummeting economic fortunes in the
aftermath of defeat in the Great War. In December 1932, a month before Adolf Hitler
became chancellor of Germany, Einstein made the decision to emigrate to the United
States, where he took a position at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study
in Princeton, New Jersey. He would never again enter the country of his birth.
By the time Einstein’s wife Elsa died in 1936, he had been involved for more than a
decade with his efforts to find a unified field theory, which would incorporate all
the laws of the universe, and those of physics, into a single framework. In the
process, Einstein became increasingly isolated from many of his colleagues, who
were focused mainly on the quantum theory and its implications, rather than on
relativity
In the late 1930s, Einstein’s theories, including his equation E=mc2, helped form
the basis of the development of the atomic bomb. In 1939, at the urging of the
Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, Einstein wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt
advising him to approve funding for the development of uranium before Germany could
gain the upper hand. Einstein, who became a U.S. citizen in 1940 but retained his
Swiss citizenship, was never asked to participate in the resulting Manhattan
Project, as the U.S. government suspected his socialist and pacifist views. In
1952, Einstein declined an offer extended by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s premier, to
become president of Israel.
Throughout the last years of his life, Einstein continued his quest for a unified
field theory. Though he published an article on the theory in Scientific American
in 1950, it remained unfinished when he died, of an aortic aneurysm, five years
later. In the decades following his death, Einstein’s reputation and stature in the
world of physics only grew, as physicists began to unravel the mystery of the so-
called “strong force” (the missing piece of his unified field theory) and space
satellites further verified the principles of his cosmology.
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Albert Einstein
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