Biography: Einstein

Albert Einstien was born in Ulm on March 14, 1879. He spent his childhood in Munich, and his family owned a shop that made electric machinery. Because of business failure, his family had to move to Milan when he was 15. One year after their stay there, Albert entered secondary school at Arrau, Switzerland, and then entered the Swiss National Polytechnic in Zurich. There he often spent time studying physics and playing the violin; his professors didn't think highly of him. In 1902, Einstein became an examiner at a Swiss patent office, and a year later he married Mileva Maric, who he later divorced after having two sons with.

After receiving his doctorate from the University of Zurich in 1905, Einstein published three important theoretical papers. The first was on Brownian motion, where he made correct predictions about the motion of particles randomly distributed in liquid. The second paper was on the photoelectric effect, where he hypothesized that light can be viewed as consisting of particles. He also hypothesized that the energy carried by the photon, or light particle, is proportional to the frequency of light. His third paper on special relativity led him to develop the postulates of the principle of relativity (physical laws are same in all inertial reference frames), and the invariance of the speed of light. In 1916, his full general theory of relativity was published; it described interaction of bodies and space time. Einstein received the Nobel Prize for his work in Physics in 1921. For the rest of his life, Einstein tried to come up with a unifying theory which tried to explain all physical interactions, but this was not successful.

When Hitler came to power in Germany, he left for America and got a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Later in 1939 he wrote a letter to President Roosevelt which discussed the possibility of constructing an atomic bomb. When the war was over, he became interested in World government; calling for political freedom. He was also a Zionist and a pacifist.