Einstein Essay Research Paper Einsteins early lifeEinstein

Einstein Essay, Research Paper

Einstein.s early life;

Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany on Mar. 14, 1879. Einstein’s parents, who

were non observant Jews, moved from Ulm to Munich when Einstein was an infant. The

family business was the manufacture of electrical parts. When the business failed, in 1894,

the family moved to Milan, Italy. At this time Einstein decided officially to relinquish his

German citizenship. Within a year, still without having completed secondary school,

Einstein failed an examination that would have allowed him to take a course of study

leading to a diploma as an electrical engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

He spent the next year in nearby Aarau at the continual secondary school, where he

enjoyed excellent teachers. Einstein returned in 1896 to the Swiss Federal Institute of

Technology, where he graduated, in 1900 as a secondary school teacher of mathematics

and physics.

After two years he obtained a post at the Swiss patent office in Bern. The

patent-office work required Einstein’s careful attention, but while employed there he

completed an astonishing range of publications in theoretical physics. For the most part

these texts were written in his spare time and without the benefit of close contact with

either the scientific literature or theoretician colleagues. Einstein took one of his scientific

papers to the University of Zurich to obtain a Ph.D. degree in 1905. In 1908 he sent a

second paper to the University of Bern and became a lecturer there. The next year Einstein

received a regular appointment as associate professor of physics at the University of

Zurich.

By 1909, Einstein was recognized throughout German-speaking Europe as a

leading scientific thinker. In quick succession he held professorships at the German

University of Prague and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. In 1914 he

advanced to the best-paying post that a theoretical physicist could hold in central Europe,

professor at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft in Berlin. By the age of 35 he was

recognized as the best physicist in whole Europe.

Einstaen.s later life;

When British eclipse expeditions in 1919 confirmed his predictions about the

general theory of relativity, Einstein was bombarded by the popular press. Einstein’s

personal ethics also fired public imagination. Einstein, who after returning to Germany in

1914 did not reapply for German citizenship, was one of only a handful of German

professors who remained a pacifist and did not support Germany’s war aims. After the

war, when the victorious allies sought to exclude German scientists from international

meetings, Einstein–a Jew traveling with a Swiss passport–remained an acceptable

German envoy. Einstein’s political views as a pacifist and a Zionist pitted him against

conservatives in Germany, who branded him a traitor and a defeatist. The public success

accorded his theories of relativity evoked savage attacks in the 1920s by the anti-Semitic

physicists Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard, men who after 1932 tried to create a

so-called Aryan physics in Germany. Just how controversial the theories of relativity

remained for less flexibly minded physicists is revealed in the circumstances surrounding

Einstein’s reception of a Nobel Prize in 1921–awarded not for relativity but for his 1905

work on the photoelectric effect.

With the rise of fascism in Germany, Einstein moved, in 1933 to the United States

and abandoned his pacifism. He reluctantly agreed that the new menace had to be put

down through force of arms. In this context Einstein sent a letter, in 1939, to President

Franklin D. Roosevelt that urged that the United States proceed to develop an atomic

bomb before Germany did. The letter, composed by Einstein’s friend Leo Szilard, was one

of many exchanged between the White House and Einstein, and it contributed to

Roosevelt’s decision to fund what became the Manhattan Project.

As much he appeared to the public as a champion of unpopular causes, Einstein’s

central concerns always revolved around physics. At the age of 59, when other theoretical

physicists would long since have abandoned original scientific research, Einstein and his

co-workers Leopold Infeld and Banesh Hoffmann achieved a major new result in the

general theory of relativity.

Until the end of his life Einstein sought a unified field theory, whereby the

phenomena of gravitation and electromagnetism could be derived from one set of

equations. After 1920, however, while retaining relativity as a fundamental concept,

theoretical physicists focused more attention on the theory of quantum mechanics, as

elaborated by Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and others, and Einstein’s later

thoughts went somewhat neglected for decades. This picture has changed in more recent

years. Physicists are now striving to combine Einstein’s relativity theory

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