 Albert
Einstein was probably the most famous scientist of the twentieth century. He
revolutionized scientific thinking in the modern world. He is recognized as
the greatest physicist who ever lived.
Best known as the creator of the Theory of Relativity (which are the
relationships of space, time and motion and acceleration and gravity).
Einstein would still rank as one of the greatest scientists for his
contribution to physics. Einstein described himself as a humanitarian. He was
greatly affected by the Nazis over taking Germany.
Albert
Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, to a middle-class Jewish household in Ulm,
Germany. He disliked school because of the solo, silent work. He much
preferred to study at home where he could yell when he could get an answer,
especially geometry and books on popular science.
In 1900, he graduated from the Polytechnic Institute of Zurich, Switzerland.
Failing to become a university assistant, he was eventually hired by the Swiss
Patent Office as a Probability Technical Expert, Third Class. The work was
very easy and left Einstein time to develop the ideas that he had always
wanted to.
The year 1905 saw the magnificent bloom of Einstein's creativity, and with it
came a turning point in the history of physics. Space and time would never
again be the same (Relativity); and mass was recognized as a form of energy (E
= mc²). He believed that mass is a form of energy.
Yet,
these revolutionary theories were slow to be accepted by the scientific
community, which forced Einstein to continue working at the patent office
until 1909 when he secured an associate professorship at the University of
Zurich.
From the University of Zurich, he went to spend a year at the German
University of Prague, and two more years at the Zurich Polytechnic before
settling in Berlin in 1914 as professor at the university and later director
of the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics.
Beginning in the late 1920's, Albert Einstein tried to combine electromagnetic
and gravitational phenomena in a single theory, called the Unified Field
Theory. Though he spent the last 25 years of his life working on it, he never
succeeded in completing this theory.
In 1933, while Einstein was visiting England and the United States, the Nazi
government of Germany took his property and robbed him of his position and his
citizenship. Einstein then moved permanently to the United States where he
became a member of the newly created Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey.
In 1939, Einstein - fearful that only Hitler would have an atomic bomb - urged
President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a famous letter to engage the United States
in uranium research. That Germany, after all, didn’t have the bomb, and that
the first bomb would fall on Japan, could not have been realized. After the
war, Einstein never worked for peace. He died of his long lasting illness on
April 18, 1955 at the age of 76.
Although he was not part of any religion, Einstein felt that belief in a
personal God was too specific a concept to be the Being at work in this
universe, but he never believed that the universe was one of chance or chaos.
The universe to him was one of absolute law and order. He once said, "God
may be sophisticated, but He is not malicious."
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