Albert Einstein


Einstein is the most well-known scientist of the 20th century. He was born in Ulm on March 14, 1879, and spent his childhood in Munich, where his family owned a small shop that manufactured electric machinery. He did not talk until the age of three, but even as a child he showed a brilliant curiosity about nature and an ability to understand difficult mathematical concepts. At the age of 12 he taught himself Euclidean geometry. Einstein hated the school in Munich. When repeated business failure led the family to leave Germany for Milan, Italy, Einstein, who was then 15 years old, used the opportunity to withdraw from the school. He spent a year with his parents in Milan, and when it became clear that he would have to make his own way in the world, he finished secondary school in Arrau, Switzerland, and entered the Swiss National Polytechnic in Zürich. Einstein did not enjoy school there. He often cut classes and used the time to study physics on his own or to play his violin. He passed his examinations and graduated in 1900 by studying the notes of a classmate. His professors did not think highly of him and would not recommend him for a university position. For two years Einstein worked as a tutor and substitute teacher. In 1902 he found a position as an examiner in the Swiss patent office in Bern. In 1903, he married Mileva Mariç, who had been his classmate at the polytechnic. They had two sons but eventually divorced. Einstein later remarried. In 1905 Einstein received his doctorate from the University of Zürich for a theoretical dissertation on the dimensions of molecules, and he also published three theoretical papers of central importance to the development of 20th-century physics. The difficulty that others had with Einstein's work was not because it was too mathematically complex, the problem resulted, rather, from Einstein's beliefs about the nature of good theories. Einstein's chief early patron was the German physicist Max Planck. Einstein remained at the patent office for four years after his star began to rise within the physics community. He then moved rapidly upward in the German-speaking academic world; his first academic appointment was in 1909 at the University of Zürich. In 1911 he moved to the German-speaking university at Prague, and in 1912 he returned to the Swiss National Polytechnic in Zürich. Finally, in 1913, he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin. During World War 11, Einstein became sure that Hitler was going to bomb the U.S. He tried to get other scientists to help him make an atomic bomb. When Einstein and some other scientists finished the bomb, it was used to bomb Hiroshima, a Japenese City. For the rest of his life Einstein devoted considerable time to generalizing his theory even more. His last effort, the unified field theory, which was not entirely successful, was an attempt to understand all physical interactions-including electromagnetic interactions and weak and strong interactions-in terms of the modification of the geometry of space-time between interacting entities. Einstein, however, would not accept such notions and remained a critic of these developments until the end of his life. After 1919, Einstein became internationally renowned. He recieved honors and awards, including the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922. His visit to any part of the world became a national event; photographers and reporters followed him everywhere. While regretting his loss of privacy, Einstein capitalized on his fame to further his own political and social views.