All about Albert Einstein
By Students’ Academy
Copyright@2011Students’ Academy
Smashwords Edition
Chapter 1
Introduction
The world of science and technology is immensely indebted to one person, the person who changed our whole understanding of atomic world and material around us. Modern science would not have reached the present stage had it not been for the great contributions made by Albert Einstein.
Albert Einstein was a German scientist; he was born on 14th March, 1879, in Germany but he came to be recognized as Swiss-American theoretical physicist, philosopher, and an author who has influenced millions of people all over the world.
Albert Einstein is highly regarded as one of the best known scientists and geniuses of all time. Every modern scientist, in one way or another, is influenced by the theories which Einstein gave us. Einstein is generally regarded as ‘the father of modern physics’. His contribution to the Theoretical Physics is recognized all over the world. He was awarded the coveted Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. Einstein was the scientist who discovered the law of the photoelectric effect.
Some of Einstein’s greatest contributions to Theoretical Physics are:
General Theories of Relativity
The Post-Newtonian Expansion, explaining the perihelion advance of Mercury
Prediction of the deflection of light by gravity and gravitational lensing
The first fluctuation dissipation theorem
The photon theory and wave particle duality
The quantum theory of atomic motion in solids
The zero-point energy concept
The semi classical version of the Schrodinger equation
The quantum theory of a monatomic gas; it predicted Bose-Einstein condensation.
Albert Einstein wrote extensively and during his lifetime he published more than three hundred scientific and over one hundred and fifty non-scientific works. Einstein gave his prolific views on philosophy and politics.
Chapter 2
Early Years and Education
Einstein’s Photo when he was four year old
Einstein’s father, Hermann Einstein, was a salesman and engineer in Germany. Pauline Einstein was Albert Einstein’s mother. In the year 1880, the Einstein family shifted to Munich and his father and uncle stabled a company named Elektrotechnische Fabrik, Einstein & Cie. The company began to produce the electrical equipments based on direct current. In those days, electric goods were in great demand.
14-year old Albert Einstein in 1893
Einstein was a brilliant child and he began to learn things very quickly; he began to understand deductive reasoning from Euclid. Only at the age of twelve, Einstein had learned Euclidean geometry. Since he was a curious child, he began to investigate infinitesimal calculus. It is quite surprising that only at the age of sixteen, Albert Einstein performed his fist thought experiment. He visualized the travelling alongside a beam of light. This experiment led to further advancements and he began to study more rigorously.
Einstein’s parents were non-observant Jews. Albert Einstein studied at a Catholic Elementary School from the age of five years until ten. In his early years of his childhood, Einstein had speech difficulties but he became the top student in Elementary School. With the passing years, the boy Einstein began to show his extraordinary talent and be began to build various models and mechanical devices for fun; his talent for mathematics could not pass unnoticed.
When Einstein was ten years old, in the year 1889, Max Talmud introduced him to key texts in science, mathematics and philosophy, including Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Euclid’s Elements (which Einstein called the "holy little geometry book").
Max Talmud was from Poland; he was a poor Jewish medical student Since Talmud could not support himself financially, the Jewish community arranged for Talmud to take meals with the Einsteins each week on Thursdays for six years. During this time Talmud wholeheartedly guided Einstein through many secular educational interests.
With the advent and introduction of Alternating Current, equipments which worked on Direct Current began to lose market. As a result, in 1894, the company which Einstein’s father had established failed.
After the failure of their business in Munich, in search of a new business, the Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan and then, a few months later, to Pavia. When the family moved to Pavia, Einstein stayed in Munich to finish his studies at the Luitpold Gymnasium.
Einstein’s father wanted that young Albert Einstein should become an Electrical Engineer, but Einstein clashed with authorities and showed his resentment against the school’s regimen and teaching method. He later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in strict rote learning. In the spring of 1895, he withdrew to join his family in Pavia, convincing the school to let him go by using a doctor’s note. During this time, Einstein wrote his first scientific work, "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields".
Einstein sent a direct application to the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland. Lacking the requisite Matura certificate, he took an entrance examination, which he failed, although he got exceptional marks in mathematics and physics. The Einsteins sent Albert to Aarau, in northern Switzerland to finish secondary school.
During the period Einstein spent living with the family of Professor Jost Winteler, he fell in love with the family’s daughter, Marie. (His sister Maja later married the Winteler son, Paul.) In Aarau, Einstein studied Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory. At age 17, he graduated, and, with his father’s approval, renounced his citizenship in the German Kingdom of Württemberg to avoid military service, and enrolled in 1896 in the mathematics and physics program at the Polytechnic in Zurich. Marie Winteler moved to Olsberg, Switzerland for a teaching post.
During the same period, Mileva Maric, who was going to be Einstein’s wife in future, also entered the Polytechnic to study mathematics and physics, the only woman in the academic cohort. Gradually, with the passage of time, their friendship developed into deep romance and they became lovers. In a letter to her, Einstein called Marić “a creature who is my equal and who is as strong and independent as I am.” Einstein graduated in 1900 from the Polytechnic with a diploma in mathematics and physics; although historians have debated whether Marić influenced Einstein’s work, the majority of academic historians of science agree that she did not.
Chapter 3
Relationships and Marriages
In January of 1903 Einstein and Maric married. The following year, in the month of May, the couple’s first son, Hans Albert Einstein, was born in Bern, Switzerland. Their second son, Eduard, was born in Zurich in July 1910. In 1914, Einstein moved to Berlin, while his wife remained in Zurich with their sons. Marić and Einstein divorced on 14 February 1919, having lived apart for five years.
Einstein’s wife Mileva Maric was living with her parents in Novi Sad where she gave birth to a daughter. The Einsteins named her Lieserl in their correspondence. Her full name is not known, and her fate is uncertain after 1903.
Einstein married Elsa Löwenthal (née Einstein) on 2 June 1919, after having had a relationship with her since 1912. She was his first cousin maternally and his second cousin paternally. In 1933, they immigrated permanently to the United States. In 1935, Elsa Einstein was diagnosed with heart and kidney problems and died in December 1936.
Chapter 4
Patenting
Left to right: Conrad Habicht, Maurice Solovine and Einstein, who founded the Olympia Academy
The time after his graduation of college was not easy for Einstein, for he had to spend almost two frustrating years searching for a teaching post, but a former classmate’s father helped him secure a job in Bern, at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property, the patent office, as an assistant examiner. Einstein began to evaluate patent applications for electromagnetic devices. As a result of his hard work and dedication, in the year 1903, Einstein’s position at the Swiss Patent Office became permanent, although he was passed over for promotion until he "fully mastered machine technology".
His work at the patent office increased Einstein’s knowledge to a very great extent. Maximum amount of his work there was related to questions about transmission of electric signals and electrical-mechanical synchronization of time, two technical problems that show up conspicuously in the thought experiments that eventually led Einstein to his radical conclusions about the nature of light and the fundamental connection between space and time.
In Bern, Einstein made new friends and maintained good relations with them. After some time in Bern, with the help of his new friends, Einstein formed a weekly discussion club on science and philosophy, which he jokingly named "The Olympia Academy." Their readings included the works of Henri Poincaré, Ernst Mach, and David Hume, which influenced his scientific and philosophical outlook.
Chapter 5
Einstein’s Academic Career
The Einsteinhaus on the Kramgasse in Bern, where Einstein lived with his first wife during his Annus Mirabilis
The year 1901 brought him some recognition when he had a paper on the capillary forces of a straw published in the prestigious Annalen der Physik. After four years, in 1905, Einstein received his doctorate from the University of Zurich. His thesis was titled "On a new determination of molecular dimensions". 1905 is said to be Einstein’s ‘miracle year’. In the same year, he published four groundbreaking papers, on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of matter and energy, which were to bring him to the notice of the academic world.
Albert Einstein was recognized as a leading scientist in the year 1908, and he was appointed lecturer at the University of Berne. He did not work there long, for he left the lecturer’s post and his work at the patent office to take the position of physics professor at the University of Zurich. He became a full professor at Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague in 1911. In 1914, he returned to Germany after being appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and professor at the University of Berlin.