EINSTEIN, ALBERT

EINSTEIN, ALBERT (1879–1955), Germanborn physicist.

Albert Einstein, the only son of Hermann and Pauline (Koch) Einstein, was born on 14 March 1879 in Ulm, Germany. In the summer of 1880 the family moved to Munich where Hermann and his youngest brother became partners in running an electrochemical factory, and where, in 1881, Albert's sister, Maria ("Maja"), was born. Albert, who was slow in learning to speak, nevertheless manifested, as a young child, a prescient interest in magnetism, mathematics, and the electrical devices in his father's shop. At the age of six he began attending a nearby school, the Catholic Peterschule, where he was the only Jew among over seventy classmates. Four years later he was accepted by Luitpold Gymnasium, and the school's principal later claimed, contrary to a popular myth, that Albert was actually a good student. Einstein's own recollections were that he was fond of some teachers and subjects, especially geometry, but he disliked this secondary school's regimented learning.

In the summer of 1894 Hermann, whose business failed because of lost contracts to large firms, moved his family to Pavia in northern Italy where he and his brother began another company, but Albert was left in Munich to complete his gymnasium education. Lonely and unhappy, he convinced authorities that he was suffering from "neurasthenic exhaustion," dropped out of school, and joined his family in Italy. After a period of recuperation he took and failed the entrance examination for the Federal Institute of Technology (or Polytechnic) in Zurich, Switzerland, necessitating a remedial program at a cantonal school in Aarau. In 1896, after passing the entrance examination, he began a four-year program in physics and mathematics during which he did well in courses that he liked and poorly in courses he disliked. He befriended Marcel Grossmann, whose excellent course notes permitted Einstein to pursue private studies of the works of such scientists as James Clerk Maxwell and Ernst Mach. He also met and fell in love with Mileva Mari?, an Orthodox Christian Serb who was preparing, like Albert, to become a physics teacher. After Einstein received his Polytechnic diploma in 1900, he was unable to get a job as a physicist and made do with temporary teaching positions. His situation was complicated by Mileva's pregnancy. She returned to her parents' home in Hungary where their daughter Lieserl was born (her subsequent fate remains a mystery). When Marcel Grossmann's father helped Einstein obtain a position as an examiner at the Patent Office in Bern, he was able to marry Mileva on 6 January 1903.

career and achievements

During his tenure as a patent clerk, Einstein, in his spare time, made discoveries that would lead scholars

to rank him with such revolutionary figures as Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin because, like them, he transformed our basic conceptions of the world. He began publishing papers in which he offered insightful interpretations of the scientific observations of others, and in 1905, the year he received his doctorate from the University of Zurich, he published significant papers on Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, and special relativity.

The Scottish botanist Robert Brown had observed the random zigzagging of pollen grains in water, but Einstein was able to explain these apparently chaotic motions in terms of the fluctuations of the water molecules hitting these particles. His mathematical analysis, which allowed him to determine the number of water molecules in a specific volume, helped convince skeptical physicists of the reality of the atom.

Physicists had earlier found that when light hit a metal plate, electrons were ejected (the photoelectric effect), and the speed of these electrons did not depend on the brightness of the incident beam. Einstein explained this photoelectric effect, which was inexplicable in terms of the wave theory of light, by expanding Max Planck's quantum theory to include light falling on the metal as packets (or quanta) of radiation (later called photons). Einstein would receive the 1921 Nobel prize in physics for this explanation.

The two papers on the special theory of relativity that Einstein wrote in 1905, his "wonderful year," presented a new view of matter, motion, time, and the universe that revolutionized physics. He called this theory "special" because it dealt only with uniformly moving systems in which he assumed that all physical laws are invariant and the speed of light is a constant. He then proved that two widely separated observers assign different times to the same event (the relativity of simultaneity), that a rapidly moving clock runs slow, and that an object's inertial mass increases with speed—leading to the century's most famous equation, E = mc², which related energy (E), mass (m), and and the speed of light (c).

Einstein went on to extend his ideas to nonuniformly moving systems (the general theory of relativity). This task, based on the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass, was much more difficult than the special theory, but during the second decade of the twentieth century he explained how matter influences the curvature of space, leading to his prediction that a light ray from a distant star would follow a curved path near the sun. When, after the end of World War I, this prediction was tested in 1919, it was confirmed by observations made during a solar eclipse, an event that captured the public imagination and turned Einstein into a symbol of the scientific genius of the twentieth century.

While Einstein was working on the special and general theories, he and Mileva had two sons, but the marriage was troubled by his adulteries and his increasing emotional separation from his wife. The success of his theories had led to his leaving the patent office and to a series of academic positions, principally in Switzerland, but in 1917 he became the prestigious director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of the University of Berlin, an event that resulted in his permanent separation from Mileva, who retained custody of their boys, and to their divorce in February of 1919. Four months later he married his cousin, Elsa Einstein Löwenthal, a widow with two daughters. During the 1920s and for the rest of his life Einstein worked to generalize his theory of gravity so that it would include electromagnetic phenomena (the unified field theory), but unlike the special and general theories, he failed in his many efforts to effect this unification.

Now internationally famous, he traveled around the world, and it was in 1933, during one of his trips, that the Nazis, who had assumed political power, deprived Einstein of his German citizenship and confiscated his property. He emigrated to the United States and took up residence in Princeton, New Jersey, where he had an appointment to the Institute of Advanced Study. Eventually his stepdaughter Margot and his sister Maja joined him and Elsa. Concerned about the growing military power of Nazi Germany, Einstein signed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the summer of 1939, which played an important role in the origin of the "Manhattan Project" to develop an atomic bomb. Einstein became an American citizen in 1940 and served as an adviser to the U.S. Navy during World War II. In the postwar period he campaigned against nuclear weapons, championed world government, and refused an offer to become president of Israel. Elsa had died in 1936, and his sister's death in 1951 left him emotionally distraught. A ruptured aortic aneurysm caused his own death on 18 April 1955 in a Princeton hospital. His passing did not mean the end of his influence, and physicists around the world continue to pursue "Einstein's dream" of the unification of the basic forces of the universe.

See alsoMach, Ernst; Maxwell, James Clerk; Physics; Planck, Max.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Einstein, Albert. Autobiographical Notes: A Centennial Edition. LaSalle, Ill., 1979. This brief autobiography was first published in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston, Ill., 1949).

——. The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. 9 vols to date. Princeton, N.J., 1987–. This massive project, now under the general editorship of Diana Kormos Buchwald, aims to provide as complete an account as possible of Einstein's public and private writings. Introductions and scholarly apparatus are in English, and every document appears in its original language, but each volume is also supplemented by English translations of the non-English materials.

Secondary Sources

Fölsing, Albrecht. Albert Einstein: A Biography. Translated by Ewald Osers. New York, 1997. Originally published in German in 1993, this biography has been called the best general treatment of Einstein's life.

Pais, Abraham. "Subtle Is the Lord—": The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein. Oxford, U.K., and New York, 1982. An excellent scientific biography written by a physicist who knew Einstein and had complete access to his archives.

Robert J. Paradowski