FREE ESSAY ON ALBERT EINSTIEN

ALBERT EINSTIEN

Men and Women of Science
Albert Einstein
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, Germany 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 end his German
citizenship. Within a year, still without having completed secondary school, Einstein
failed an examination that would have allowed him to pursue 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 cantonal secondary school, where he enjoyed
excellent teachers and first-rate facilities in physics. 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 (1902-1909) 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 submitted 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
most prestigious and best-paying post that a theoretical physicist could hold in central
Europe, professor at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft in Berlin.
The 1905 papers
In the first of three papers that were published in 1905, Einstein examined the
phenomenon discovered by Max Planck, according to which electromagnetic energy seemed to
be emitted from radiating objects in quantities that were ultimately discrete. The energy
of these emitted quantities, the so-called light-quanta was directly proportional to the
frequency of the radiation. This circumstance was perplexing because classical
electromagnetic theory, based on Maxwell's equations and the laws of thermodynamics, had
assumed that electromagnetic energy consisted of waves propagating in a hypothetical,
all-pervasive medium called the luminiferous ether, and that the waves could contain any
amount of energy no matter how small. Einstein used Planck's quantum hypothesis to
describe visible electromagnetic radiation, or light. According to Einstein's resourceful
viewpoint, light could be imagined to consist of discrete bundles of radiation. Einstein
used this interpretation to explain the photoelectric effect, by which certain metals
emit electrons when illuminated by light with a given frequency. Einstein's theory, and
his subsequent elaboration of it, formed the basis for much of quantum mechanics.
The second of Einstein's 1905 papers proposed what is today called the special theory of
relativity. At the time Einstein knew that, according to Hendrik Antoon Lorentz's theory
of electrons, the mass of an electron increased as the velocity of the electron
approached the velocity of light. Einstein also knew that the electron theory, based on
Maxwell's equations, carried along with it the assumption of a luminiferous ether, but
that attempts to detect the physical properties of the ether had not succeeded. Einstein
realized that the equations describing the motion of an electron in fact could describe
the nonaccelerated motion of any particle or any suitably defined rigid body. He based
his new kinematics on a reinterpretation of the classical principle of relativity, that
the laws of physics had to have the same form in any frame of reference. As a second
fundamental hypothesis, Einstein assumed that the speed of light remained constant in all
frames of reference, as required by classical Maxwellian theory. Einstein abandoned the
hypothesis of the ether, for it played no role in his kinematics or in his
reinterpretation of Lorentz's theory of electrons. As a consequence of his theory
Einstein recovered the phenomenon of time dilatation, wherein time, analogous to length
and mass, is a function of the velocity of a frame of reference. Later in 1905, Einstein
elaborated how, in a certain manner of speaking, mass and energy were equivalent.
Einstein was not the first to propose all the elements that went into the special theory
of relativity; his contribution lies in having unified important parts of classical
mechanics and Maxwellian electrodynamics.
The third of Einstein's seminal papers of 1905 concerned statistical mechanics, a field
of study that had been elaborated by, among others, Ludwig Boltzmann and Josiah Willard
Gibbs. Unaware of Gibbs' contributions, Einstein extended Boltzmann's work and calculated
the average trajectory of a microscopic particle buffeted by random collisions with
molecules in a fluid or in a gas. Einstein observed that his calculations could account
for brownian motion, the apparently erratic movement of pollen in fluids, which had been
noted by the British botanist Robert Brown. Einstein's paper provided convincing evidence
for the physical existence of atom-sized molecules, which had already received much
theoretical discussion. His results were independently discovered by the Polish physicist
Marian von Smoluchowski and later elaborated by the French physicist Jean Perrin. (
http://www.humboldt1.com/~gralsto/einstein/1905.html)
General Theory of Relativity
After 1905, Einstein continued working in all three of his works in the 1905 Papers. He
made important contributions to the quantum theory, but increasingly he sought to extend
the special theory of relativity to phenomena involving acceleration. The key to an
elaboration emerged in 1907 with the principle of equivalence, in which gravitational
acceleration was held a priori indistinguishable from acceleration caused by mechanical
forces; gravitational mass was therefore identical with inertial mass. Einstein elevated
this identity, which is implicit in the work of Isaac Newton, to a guiding principle in
his attempts to explain both electromagnetic and gravitational acceleration according to
one set of physical laws. In 1907 he proposed that if mass were equivalent to energy,
then the principle of equivalency required that gravitational mass would interact with
the apparent mass of electromagnetic radiation, which includes light. By 1911, Einstein
was able to make preliminary predictions about how a ray of light from a distant star,
passing near the Sun, would appear to be attracted, or bent slightly, in the direction of
the Sun's mass. At the same time, light radiated from the Sun would interact with the
Sun's mass, resulting in a slight change toward the infrared end of the Sun's optical
range. At this turning point Einstein also knew that any new theory of gravitation would
have to account for a small but persistent anomaly in the perihelion motion of the planet
Mercury.
About 1912, Einstein began a new phase of his gravitational research, with the help of
his mathematician friend Marcel Grossmann, by phrasing his work in terms of the tensor
calculus of Tullio Levi-Civita and Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro. The tensor calculus greatly
facilitated calculations in four-dimensional space-time, a notion that Einstein had
obtained from Hermann Minkowski's 1907 mathematical elaboration of Einstein's own special
theory of relativity.
Einstein called his new work the general theory of relativity. After a number of false
starts, he published the definitive form of the general theory in late 1915. In it the
gravitational field equations were covariant; that is, similar to Maxwell's equations,
the field equations took the same form in all equivalent frames of reference. To their
advantage from the beginning, the covariant field equations gave the observed perihelion
motion of the planet Mercury. In its original form, Einstein's general relativity has
been verified numerous times in the past 60 years, especially during solar-eclipse
expeditions when Einstein's light-deflection prediction could be tested. 
(http://www.humboldt1.com/~gralsto/einstein/relativ.html)
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 hitlerism in Germany, Einstein moved, in 1933 to the United States and
abandoned his pacifism. He reluctantly agreed that the new hazard 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 with quantum theory in a theory
of everything, by means of such highly advanced mathematical models as superstring
theories.