Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in the small town of Ulm, in Southern Germany, near Europes longest river, the Danube. His parents, Hermann and Pauline, were Jewish. His father was an electrician who was also interested in electrical inventions. However he was very unsuccessful in his business, and as soon as Albert was born, the family moved to Munich. As a child Einstein was very lonely and shy. He preferred to play with himself in the parks and woods. He first realized the wonders of science at the age of four, when his dad introduced him to magnets.
Later in his, Einstein’s Uncle Jacob introduced him to mathematics. School was an unpleasant experience for Einstein. He was disgusted by how war strategies were taught at school and he had disgust for the military discipline that was taught in German schools. Alberts teachers were not happy with how poorly he was doing in school. Alberts family wasnt doing very well either there financial situation was getting worse. Einstein’s relatives in Northern City of Milan Italy, offered help to the family. At the time Einstein was at the age of fifteen and he decided to dropout of high school and join his family to travel to Milan.
Albert Einstein had become a dropout. In Italy he felt free for the first time, he traveled through the countryside. He visited museums and art galleries, attended concerts and lectures, and most of all Einstein read books. But his good times did not last long. The electrical engineering business his father started had encountered one setback after another. The young researcher was told to settle down to a practical life of self-support. Albert could not imagine himself doing a career with a routine office, nor he could accept a profession like his father’s.
Albert finally decided he needed to go to college. But because he had not graduated from high school, he could not enter any university in Germany. However, in Zurich, Switzerland, there was the country’s famous Federal Institute of Technology. Einstein was sixteen at the time when he took the examination. He failed it, not in mathematics and physics, but in botany and languages. Einstein was advised to complete his secondary education at a high school. Einstein received the diploma that opened the doors to ETH. Einstein had become a university student.
Einstein threw himself into his studies, but even the well-known teachers at the university were easy for Einstein and did not help him to learn as much as he wanted to. He often cut classes and at the library he studied the works of physicists such as Heinrich Hertz, the discoverer of radio waves; Hermann Von Helmholtz, a proponent of the theory of sound and light, and many others. Eventually, Einstein graduated at the age of twenty-one from ETH. Now, it was time for Einstein to stand on his own feet and make a living.
Einstein loved to teach, and several of his professors had offered him to be a lecture assistant, For the next few years he taught in a technical high school, and later he became a tutor for a private school. In those years Einstein was in a good position, but when he asked his charges for a larger share of education, he lost his job. So now, the former dropout who managed to graduate from a university, was now unemployed. In one year, 1905, Einstein published four research papers, during his free time at the patent office, anyone of which would have made him a name in scientific circles.
The first one, on the so-called Brownian motion, dealt with a particular motion of pollen particles suspended in a fluid. These particles dart in all directions as if they were alive, the motion becoming livelier the higher the temperature of the fluid. If we trace the path of such a particle, we would find a highly irregular zig zag line that apparently follows no inner law, as if it were just a random motion. Einstein showed that these jerky motions are caused by the many pushes the suspended particles receive from the still smaller molecules of the fluid that collide with it.
Einstein showed that statistical fluctuations would cause imbalances large enough to give the particle an erratic, zig zag motion that can be observed under a microscope. If one waited long enough, the random zigzags would give rise to varying amounts of movement, which could be calculated by statistical methods. That such an apparently random motion should actually satisfy a very definite mathematical law that can be verified by direct observations was highly suprising. It demonstrated Einstein’s uncanny ability to apply statistical reasoning and gave strong support to the atomic theory of matter.
Photoelectric effect, the subject of Einsteins second research papers in 1905. It has been found that the number of electrons, and thus the electric current, increases in the same way, as does the amount of light falling on the metal. For example, if we double the intensity, power of the light source, the electric current is doubled. However the energy of the emitted electrons does not increase if the intensity is increased. Moreover, the energy of the electrons depends on the color of the light; for some colors, no electrons are emitted, no matter how intense the light.
Einstein now showed that under certain circumstances light also behaves like particles; nowadays these light particles are called photons. The photoelectric effect then arises from a bombardment of certain metals by photons, resulting in the emission of electrons. Einstein’s third research paper was concerned with the nature of molecules. We all know that if we drop a lump of sugar into water it dissolves and diffuses through the water, making the liquid somewhat more sticky.
Thinking of water as a structure less fluid and the sugar molecules as small hard spheres, Einstein was able to find not only the size of the sugar molecules but a value for Avogadro’s number, the number of molecules in a gas in certain standard volume under specified conditions. True, this quantity had already appeared earlier in the theory of gases, but not until then in connection with solutions in liquids. Einstein submitted his paper on the nature of molecules as his doctoral thesis to the University of Zurich. It was rejected as being too short. He added one sentence and it was accepted.
The paper that made Einstein famous, of course, was on what is now known as the special theory of relativity. In 1908 Einstein became a lecturer at the University of Bern after submitting his Habilitation thesis “Consequences for the constitution of radiation following from the energy distribution law of black bodies”. The following year he became professor of physics at the University of Zurich, having resigned his lectureship at Bern and his job in the patent office in Bern. 1909 recognized Einstein as a leading scientific thinker and in the same year he also resigned from the patent office.
He was hired as a full-time professor at the Karl Ferdinand University in Prague in 1911. For Einstein the year 1911 was a very significant year because he was able to make preliminary predictions about how a ray of light from a distant star, passing near the Sun, would appear to be bent slightly, in the direction of the Sun. This would be highly significant, as it would lead to the first experimental evidence in favor of Einstein’s theory. In 1912, Einstein began a new phase of his gravitational research. Einstein called his new work the general theory of relativity.
He moved from Prague to Zurich in 1912 to take up a chair at the Eidgenssische Technische Hochschule in Zurich. Einstein traveled back to his homeland Germany in 1914 but did not reapply for German citizenship. It was an incredible offer that he accepted then. It was a research position in the Prussian Academy of Sciences together with a chair at the University of Berlin. He was also offered the directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin, which was about to be established. However, after a number of mistakes, Einstein published, late in 1915, the definitive version of general theory.
Just before publishing this work he lectured on general relativity at Gttingen. In 1921 Einstein made his first visit ever to the U. S. His purpose was to raise funds for the planned Hebrew University of Jerusalem. However, he received the Barnard Medal during his visit and lectured several times on relativity. Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his 1905 work on the photoelectric effect. Einstein in fact was not present in December 1922 to receive the prize being on a trip to Japan. During this time he made many international visits.
He had visited Paris earlier in 1922 and in 1923 he visited Palestine. After making his last major scientific discovery on the association of waves with matter in 1924 he made further visits in 1925, this time to South America. Einstein’s life had been hectic and he paid the price in 1928 with a physical collapse brought on through overwork. However he made a full recovery despite having to take things easy throughout 1928. In 1930 he was making international visits again, back to the United States. A third visit to the United States in 1932 was followed by the offer of a post at Princeton.
The idea was that Einstein would spend seven months a year in Berlin, five months at Princeton. Einstein accepted and left Germany in December 1932 for the United States. The following month the Nazis came to power in Germany and Einstein was never to return there. During 1933 Einstein traveled in Europe visiting Zurich, Oxford, Glasgow and Brussells. What was intended only as a visit became a permanent arrangement by 1935 when he applied and was granted permanent residency in the United States. In 1940 Einstein became a citizen of the United States, but chose to retain his Swiss citizenship.
He made many contributions to peace during his life. In 1944 he made a contribution to the war effort by hand writing his 1905 paper on special relativity and putting it up for auction. It raised six million dollars, the manuscript today being in the Library of Congress. By 1949 Einstein was unwell. He left his scientific papers to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a university, which he had raised funds for on his first visit to the USA. served as a governor of the university from 1925 to 1928 but he had turned down the offer of a post in 1933 as he was very critical of its administration.