Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein (1879-1955), German-born American physicist and Nobel

laureate, best known as the creator of the special and general theories of
relativity and for his bold hypothesis concerning the particle nature of light.
He is perhaps the most well-known scientist of the 20th century.
Einstein was born in Ulm on March 14, 1879, and spent his youth in Munich,
where his family owned a small shop that manufactured electric
machinery. He did not talk until the age of three, but even as a youth he
showed a brilliant curiosity about nature and an ability to understand difficult
mathematical concepts. At the age of 12 he taught himself Euclidean
geometry.

Einstein hated the dull regimentation and unimaginative spirit of school in

Munich. When repeated business failure led the family to leave Germany for
Milan, Italy, Einstein, who was then 15 years old, used the opportunity to
withdraw from the school. He spent a year with his parents in Milan, and
when it became clear that he would have to make his own way in the world,
he finished secondary school in Aarau, Switzerland, and entered the Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. Einstein did not enjoy the methods
of instruction there. He often cut classes and used the time to study physics
on his own or to play his beloved violin. He passed his examinations and
graduated in 1900 by studying the notes of a classmate. His professors did
not think highly of him and would not recommend him for a university
position.

For two years Einstein worked as a tutor and substitute teacher. In 1902 he
secured a position as an examiner in the Swiss patent office in Bern. In 1903
he married Mileva Marić, who had been his classmate at the polytechnic.
They had one daughter, who was born prior to their marriage and given up
for adoption, and two sons. The couple eventually divorced, and Einstein
later remarried.

EARLY SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS

In 1905 Einstein received his doctorate from the University of Zürich for a
theoretical dissertation on the dimensions of molecules, and he also
published three theoretical papers of central importance to the development
of 20th-century physics. In the first of these papers, on Brownian motion, he
made significant predictions about the motion of particles that are randomly
distributed in a fluid. These predictions were later confirmed by experiment.

The second paper, on the photoelectric effect, contained a revolutionary

hypothesis concerning the nature of light. Einstein not only proposed that
under certain circumstances light can be considered as consisting of
particles, but he also hypothesized that the energy carried by any light
particle, called a photon, is proportional to the frequency of the radiation.
The formula for this is E = hν, where E is the energy of the radiation, h is a
universal constant known as Planck’s constant, and ν is the frequency of the
radiation. This proposal—that the energy contained within a light beam is
transferred in individual units, or quanta—contradicted a hundred-year-old
tradition of considering light energy a manifestation of continuous processes.
Virtually no one accepted Einstein’s proposal. In fact, when the American
physicist Robert Andrews Millikan experimentally confirmed the theory
almost a decade later, he was surprised and somewhat disquieted by the
outcome.

Einstein, whose prime concern was to understand the nature of

electromagnetic radiation, subsequently urged the development of a theory
that would be a fusion of the wave and particle models for light. Again, very
few physicists understood or were sympathetic to these ideas.

EINSTEIN’S SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY

Einstein’s third major paper in 1905, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving

Bodies,” contained what became known as the special theory of relativity.
Since the time of the English mathematician and physicist Sir Isaac Newton,
natural philosophers (as physicists and chemists were known) had been
trying to understand the nature of matter and radiation, and how they
interacted in some unified world picture. The position that mechanical laws
are fundamental has become known as the mechanical world view, and the
position that electrical laws are fundamental has become known as the
electromagnetic world view. Neither approach, however, is capable of
providing a consistent explanation for the way radiation (light, for example)
and matter interact when viewed from different inertial frames of reference,
that is, an interaction viewed simultaneously by an observer at rest and an
observer moving at uniform speed.

In the spring of 1905, after considering these problems for ten years,
Einstein realized that the crux of the problem lay not in a theory of matter
but in a theory of measurement. At the heart of his special theory of
relativity was the realization that all measurements of time and space
depend on judgments as to whether two distant events occur
simultaneously. This led him to develop a theory based on two postulates:
the principle of relativity, that physical laws are the same in all inertial
reference systems, and the principle of the invariance of the speed of light,
that the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant. He was thus able
to provide a consistent and correct description of physical events in different
inertial frames of reference without making special assumptions about the
nature of matter or radiation, or how they interact. Virtually no one
understood Einstein’s argument.
EARLY REACTIONS TO EINSTEIN

The difficulty that others had with Einstein’s work was not because it was too
mathematically complex or technically obscure; the problem resulted, rather,
from Einstein’s beliefs about the nature of good theories and the relationship
between experiment and theory. Although he maintained that the only
source of knowledge is experience, he also believed that scientific theories
are the free creations of a finely tuned physical intuition and that the
premises on which theories are based cannot be connected logically to
experiment. A good theory, therefore, is one in which a minimum number of
postulates is required to account for the physical evidence. This sparseness
of postulates, a feature of all Einstein’s work, was what made his work so
difficult for colleagues to comprehend, let alone support.

Einstein did have important supporters, however. His chief early patron was
the German physicist Max Planck. Einstein remained at the patent office for
four years after his star began to rise within the physics community. He then
moved rapidly upward in the German-speaking academic world; his first
academic appointment was in 1909 at the University of Zürich. In 1911 he
moved to the German-speaking university at Prague, and in 1912 he
returned to the Swiss National Polytechnic in Zürich. Finally, in 1914, he was
appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin.

THE GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY

Even before he left the patent office in 1907, Einstein began work on
extending and generalizing the theory of relativity to all coordinate systems.
He began by enunciating the principle of equivalence, a postulate that
gravitational fields are equivalent to accelerations of the frame of reference.
For example, people in a moving elevator cannot, in principle, decide
whether the force that acts on them is caused by gravitation or by a constant
acceleration of the elevator. The full general theory of relativity was not
published until 1916. In this theory the interactions of bodies, which
heretofore had been ascribed to gravitational forces, are explained as the
influence of bodies on the geometry of space-time (four-dimensional space, a
mathematical abstraction, having the three dimensions from Euclidean space
and time as the fourth dimension).

On the basis of the general theory of relativity, Einstein accounted for the
previously unexplained variations in the orbital motion of the planets and
predicted the bending of starlight in the vicinity of a massive body such as
the sun. The confirmation of this latter phenomenon during an eclipse of the
sun in 1919 became a media event, and Einstein’s fame spread worldwide.
For the rest of his life Einstein devoted considerable time to generalizing his
theory even more. His last effort, the unified field theory, which was not
entirely successful, was an attempt to understand all physical interactions—
including electromagnetic interactions and weak and strong interactions—in
terms of the modification of the geometry of space-time between interacting
entities.

Most of Einstein’s colleagues felt that these efforts were misguided. Between
1915 and 1930 the mainstream of physics was in developing a new
conception of the fundamental character of matter, known as quantum
theory. This theory contained the feature of wave-particle duality (light
exhibits the properties of a particle, as well as of a wave) that Einstein had
earlier urged as necessary, as well as the uncertainty principle, which states
that precision in measuring processes is limited. Additionally, it contained a
novel rejection, at a fundamental level, of the notion of strict causality.
Einstein, however, would not accept such notions and remained a critic of
these developments until the end of his life. “God,” Einstein once said, “does
not play dice with the world.”

WORLD CITIZEN

After 1919, Einstein became internationally renowned. He accrued honors

and awards, including the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921, from various world
scientific societies. His visit to any part of the world became a national event;
photographers and reporters followed him everywhere. While regretting his
loss of privacy, Einstein capitalized on his fame to further his own political
and social views.

The two social movements that received his full support were pacifism and
Zionism. During World War I he was one of a handful of German academics
willing to publicly decry Germany’s involvement in the war. After the war his
continued public support of pacifist and Zionist goals made him the target of
vicious attacks by anti-Semitic and right-wing elements in Germany. Even his
scientific theories were publicly ridiculed, especially the theory of relativity.

When Hitler came to power, Einstein immediately decided to leave Germany

for the United States. He took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study
at Princeton, New Jersey. While continuing his efforts on behalf of world
Zionism, Einstein renounced his former pacifist stand in the face of the
awesome threat to humankind posed by the Nazi regime in Germany.

In 1939 Einstein collaborated with several other physicists in writing a letter

to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, pointing out the possibility of making an
atomic bomb and the likelihood that the German government was embarking
on such a course. The letter, which bore only Einstein’s signature, helped
lend urgency to efforts in the U.S. to build the atomic bomb, but Einstein
himself played no role in the work and knew nothing about it at the time.

After the war, Einstein was active in the cause of international disarmament
and world government. He continued his active support of Zionism but
declined the offer made by leaders of the state of Israel to become
president of that country. In the U.S. during the late 1940s and early ‘50s
he spoke out on the need for the nation’s intellectuals to make any sacrifice
necessary to preserve political freedom. Einstein died in Princeton on April
18, 1955.

Einstein’s efforts in behalf of social causes have sometimes been viewed as

unrealistic. In fact, his proposals were always carefully thought out. Like his
scientific theories, they were motivated by sound intuition based on a
shrewd and careful assessment of evidence and observation. Although
Einstein gave much of himself to political and social causes, science always
came first, because, he often said, only the discovery of the nature of the
universe would have lasting meaning. His writings include Relativity: The
Special and General Theory (1916); About Zionism (1931); Builders of the
Universe (1932); Why War? (1933), with Sigmund Freud; The World as I See
It (1934); The Evolution of Physics (1938), with the Polish physicist Leopold
Infeld; and Out of My Later Years (1950). Einstein’s collected papers are
being published in a multivolume work, beginning in 1987.

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