Synopsis
Born in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany in 1879, Albert Einstein
developed the special and general theories of relativity. In 1921, he
won the Nobel Prize for physics for his explanation of the photoelectric
effect. Einstein is generally considered the most influential physicist
of the 20th century. He died on April 18, 1955, in Princeton, New
Jersey.
Early Life
Born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany, Albert
Einstein grew up in a secular, middle-class Jewish family. His father,
Hermann Einstein, was a salesman and engineer who, with his brother,
founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a company that
manufactured electrical equipment in Munich, Germany. His mother, the
former Pauline Koch, ran the family household. Einstein had one sister,
Maja, born two years after him.
Einstein attended elementary school at the Luitpold Gymnasium in
Munich, where he excelled in his studies. He enjoyed classical music and
played the violin. However, he felt alienated and struggled with the
rigid Prussian education he received there. He also experienced a speech
difficulty, a slow cadence in his speaking where he’d pause to consider
what to say next. In later years, Einstein would write about two events
that had a marked effect on his childhood. One was an encounter with a
compass at age five, where he marveled at the invisible forces that
turned the needle. The other was at age 12, when he discovered a book of
geometry which he read over and over.
In 1889, the Einstein family invited a poor medical Polish medical
student, Max Talmud to come to their house for Thursday evening meals.
Talmud became an informal tutor to young Albert, introducing him to
higher mathematics and philosophy. One of the books Talmud shared with
Albert was a children’s science book in which the author imagined riding
alongside electricity that was traveling inside a telegraph wire.
Einstein began to wonder what a light beam would look like if you could
run alongside it at the same speed. If light were a wave, then the light
beam should appear stationary, like a frozen wave. Yet, in reality, the
light beam is moving. This paradox led him to write his first
"scientific paper" at age 16, "The Investigation of the State of Aether
in Magnetic Fields." This question of the relative speed to the
stationary observer and the observer moving with the light was a
question that would dominate his thinking for the next 10 years.
In 1894, Hermann Einstein’s company failed to get an important
contract to electrify the city of Munich and he was forced to move his
family to Milan, Italy. Albert was left at a boarding house in Munich to
finish his education at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Alone, miserable, and
repelled by the looming prospect of military duty when he turned of age,
Albert withdrew from school using a doctor’s note to excuse him and
made his way to Milan to join his parents. His parents sympathized with
his feelings, but were concerned about the enormous problems that he
would face as a school dropout and draft dodger with no employable
skills.
Fortunately, Einstein was able to apply directly to the Eidgenössische
Polytechnische Schule (Swiss Federal Polytechnic School) in Zürich,
Switzerland. Lacking the equivalent of a high school diploma, he failed
much of the entrance exam but got exceptional marks in mathematics and
physics. Because of this, he was admitted to the school provided he
complete his formal schooling first. He went to a special high school
run by Jost Winteler in Aarau, Switzerland,
and graduated in 1896 at age 17. He became lifelong friends with the
Winteler family, with whom he had been boarding, and fell in love with
Wintelers' daughter, Marie. At this time, Einstein renounced his German
citizenship to avoid military service and enrolled at the Zurich school.
Marriage and Family
Einstein would recall that his years in Zurich were some of
the happiest of his life. He met many students who would become loyal
friends, such as Marcel Grossmann, a mathematician, and Michele Besso,
with whom he enjoyed lengthy conversations about space and time. He also
met his future wife, Mileva Maric, a fellow physics student from
Serbia.
After graduating from the Polytechnic Institute, Albert Einstein
faced a series of life crises over the next few years. Because he liked
to study on his own, he cut classes and earned the animosity of some of
his professors. One in particular, Heinrich Weber, wrote a letter of
recommendation at Einstein’s request that led to him being turned down
for every academic position that he applied to after graduation.
Meanwhile, Einstein's relationship with Maric deepened, but his parents
vehemently opposed the relationship citing her Serbian background and
Eastern Orthodox Christian religion. Einstein defied his parents and
continued to see Maric. In January, 1902, the couple had a daughter,
Lieserl, who either died of sickness or was given up for adoption—the
facts are unkown.
At this point, Albert Einstein probably reached the lowest point in
his life. He could not marry Maric and support a family without a job,
and his father's business had gone bankrupt. Desperate and unemployed,
Einstein took lowly jobs tutoring children, but he was unable to hold on
to any of them. A turning point came later in 1902, when the father of
his lifelong friend, Marcel Grossman, recommended him for a position as a
clerk in the Swiss patent office in Bern, Switzerland. About this time,
Einstein’s father became seriously ill and just before he died, gave
his blessing for him to marry. With a small but steady income, Einstein
married Maric on Jan. 6, 1903. In May, 1904 they had their first son,
Hans Albert. Their second son, Eduard, were born in 1910.
Miracle Year
At the patent office, Albert Einstein evaluated patent
applications for electromagnetic devices. He quickly mastered the job,
leaving him time to ponder on the transmission of electrical signals and
electrical-mechanical synchronization, an interest he had been
cultivating for several years. While at the polytechnic school he had
studied Scottish physicist James Maxwell's electromagnetic theories
which describe the nature of light, and discovered a fact unknown to
Maxwell himself, that the speed of light remained constant.
However, this violated Isaac Newton's
laws of motion because there is no absolute velocity in Newton's
theory. This insight led Einstein to formulate the principle of
relativity.
In 1905—often called Einstein's "miracle year"—he submitted a paper
for his doctorate and had four papers published in the Annalen der
Physik, one of the best known physics journals. The four papers—the
photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity,and the equivalence of matter and energy—would alter the course of
modern physics and bring him to the attention of the academic world. In
his paper on matter and energy, Einstein deduced the well-known equation
E=mc2, suggesting that tiny particles of matter could be converted into
huge amounts of energy, foreshadowing the development of nuclear power.
There have been claims that Einstein and his wife, Maric, collaborated
on his celebrated 1905 papers, but historians of physics who have
studied the issue find no evidence that she made any substantive
contributions. In fact, in the papers, Einstein only credits his
conversations with Michele Besso in developing relativity.
At firstm Einstein's 1905 papers were ignored by the physics
community. This began to change when he received the attention of Max
Planck, perhaps the most influential physicist of his generation and
founder of quantum theory. With Planck’s complimentary comments and his
experiments that confirmed his theories, Einstein was invited to lecture
at international meetings and he rose rapidly in the academic world. He
was offered a series of positions at increasingly prestigious
institutions, including the University of Zürich, the University of
Prague, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and finally the
University of Berlin, where he served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute for Physics from 1913 to 1933.
As his fame spread, Einstein's marriage fell apart. His constant
travel and intense study of his work, the arguments about their children
and the family’s meager finances led Einstein to the conclusion that
his marriage was over. Einstein began an affair with a cousin, Elsa
Löwenthal, whom he later married. He finally divorced Mileva in 1919 and
as a settlement agreed to give her the money he might receive if he
ever won a Nobel Prize.
Theory of Relativity
In November, 1915, Einstein completed the general theory of
relativity, which he considered his masterpiece. He was convinced that
general relativity was correct because of its mathematical beauty and
because it accurately predicted the perihelion of Mercury's orbit around
the sun, which fell short in Newton’s theory. General relativity theory
also predicted a measurable deflection of light around the sun when a
planet or another sun oribited near the sun. That prediction was
confirmed in observations by British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington
during the solar eclipse of 1919. In 1921, Albert Einstein received word
that he had received the Nobel Prize for Physics. Because relativity
was still considered controversial, Einstein received the award for his
explanation of the photoelectric effect.
In the 1920s, Einstein launched the new science of cosmology. His
equations predicted that the universe is dynamic, ever expanding or
contracting. This contradicted the prevailing view that the universe was
static, a view that Einstein held earlier and was a guiding factor in
his development of the general theory of relativity. But his later
calculations in the general theory indicated that the universe could be
expanding or contracting. In 1929,astronomer Edwin Hubble
found that the universe was indeed expanding, thereby confirming
Einstein's work. In 1930, during a visit to the Mount Wilson Observatory
near Los Angeles, Einstein met with Hubble and declared the
cosmological constant, his original theory of the static size and shape
of the universe, to be his "greatest blunder."
While Einstein was touring much of the world speaking on his theories
in the 1920s, the Nazis were rising to power under the leadership of
Adolph Hitler. Einstein’s theories on relativity became a convenient
target for Nazi propaganda. In 1931, the Nazi’s enlisted other
physicists to denounce Einstein and his theories as "Jewish physics." At
this time, Einstein learned that the new German government, now in full
control by the Nazi party, had passed a law barring Jews from holding
any official position, including teaching at universities. Einstein also
learned that his name was on a list of assassination targets, and a
Nazi organization published a magazine with Einstein's picture and the
caption "Not Yet Hanged" on the cover.
Move to the United States
In December, 1932, Einstein decided to leave Germany forever.
He took a position a the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton, New Jersey, which soon became a Mecca for physicists from
around the world. It was here that he would spend the rest of his career
trying to develop a unified field theory—an all-embracing theory that
would unify the forces of the universe, and thereby the laws of physics,
into one framework—and refute the accepted interpretation of quantum
physics. Other European scientists also fled various countries
threatened by Nazi takeover and came to the United States. Some of these
scientists knew of Nazi plans to develop an atomic weapon. For a time,
their warnings to Washington, D.C. went unheeded.
In the summer of 1939, Einstein, along with another scientist, Leo Szilard, was persuaded to write a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt
to alert him of the possibility of a Nazi bomb. President Roosevelt
could not risk the possibility that Germany might develop an atomic bomb
first. The letter is believed to be the key factor that motivated the
United States to investigate the development of nuclear weapons.
Roosevelt invited Einstein to meet with him and soon after the United
States initiated the Manhattan Project.
Not long after he began his career at the Institute in New Jersey,
Albert Einstein expressed an appreciation for the "meritocracy" of the
United States and the right people had to think what they
pleased—something he didn’t enjoy as a young man in Europe.
In 1935, Albert Einstein was granted permanent residency in the United
States and became an American citizen in 1940. As the Manhattan Project
moved from drawing board to testing and development at Los Alamos, New
Mexico, many of his colleagues were asked to develop the first atomic
bomb, but Eisenstein was not one of them. According to several
researchers who examined FBI files over the years,
the reason was the U.S. government didn't trust Einstein's lifelong
association with peace and socialist organizations. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover
went so far as to recommend that Einstein be kept out of America by the
Alien Exclusion Act, but he was overruled by the U.S. State Department.
Instead, during the war, Einstein helped the U.S. Navy evaluate designs
for future weapons systems and contributed to the war effort by
auctioning off priceless personal manuscripts. One example was a
handwritten copy of his 1905 paper on special relativity which sold for
$6.5 million, and is now located in the Library of Congress.
On August 6, 1945, while on vacation, Einstein heard the news that an
atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. He soon became
involved in an international effort to try to bring the atomic bomb
under control, and in 1946, he formed the Emergency Committee of Atomic
Scientists with physicist Leo Szilard. In 1947, in an article that he wrote for
The Atlantic Monthly,
Einstein argued that the United States should not try to monopolize the
atomic bomb, but instead should supply the United Nations with nuclear
weapons for the sole purpose of maintaining a deterrent. At this time,
Einstein also became a member of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People. He corresponded with civil rights
activist W.E.B. Du Bois and actively campaigned for the rights of African Americans.
After the war, Einstein continued to work on many key aspects of the
theory of general relativity, such as wormholes, the possibility of time
travel, the existence of black holes, and the creation of the universe.
However, he became increasingly isolated from the rest of the physics
community. With the huge developments in unraveling the secrets of atoms
and molecules, spurred on by the development to the atomic bomb, the
majority of scientists were working on the quantum theory, not
relativity. Another reason for Einstein's detachment from his colleagues
was his obsession with discovering his unified field theory. In the
1930s, Einstein engaged in a series of historic private debates with Niels Bohr,
the originator of the Bohr atomic model. In a series of "thought
experiments," Einstein tried to find logical inconsistencies in the
quantum theory, but was unsuccessful. However, in his later years, he
stopped opposing quantum theory and tried to incorporate it, along with
light and gravity, into the larger unified field theory he was
developing.
In the last decade of his life, Einstein withdrew from public life,
rarely traveling far and confining himself to long walks around
Princeton with close associates, whom he engaged in deep conversations
about politics, religion, physics and his unified field theory.
Final Years
On April 17, 1955, while working on a speech he was preparing
to commemorate Israel's 17th anniversary, Einstein suffered an
abdominal aortic aneurysm and experienced internal bleeding. He was
taken to the University Medical Center at Princeton for treatment, but
refused surgery, believing that he had lived his life and was content to
accept his fate. Einstein died at the university medical center early
the next morning—April 18, 1955—at the age of 76.
During the autopsy,
Thomas Stoltz Harvey removed Einstein's brain, seemingly without the
permission of his family, for preservation and future study by doctors
of neuroscience. His remains were cremated and his ashes were scattered
in an undisclosed location. After decades of study, Einstein's brain is
now located at the Princeton University Medical Center.
