Early life and career.
Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, on March 14, 1879. The following year his family moved to Munich, where Hermann Einstein, his father, and Jakob Einstein, his uncle, set up a small electrical plant and engineering works. In Munich Einstein attended rigidly disciplined schools. Under the harsh and pedantic regimentation of 19th-century German education, which he found intimidating and boring, he showed little scholastic ability. At the behest of his mother, Einstein also studied music; though throughout life he played exclusively for relaxation, he became an accomplished violinist. It was then only Uncle Jakob who stimulated in Einstein a fascination for mathematics and Uncle Cäsar Koch who stimulated a consuming curiosity about science.
By the age of 12 Einstein had decided to devote himself to solving the riddle of the "huge world." Three years later, with poor grades in history, geography, and languages, he left school with no diploma and went to Milan to rejoin his family, who had recently moved there from Germany because of his father's business setbacks. Albert Einstein resumed his education in Switzerland, culminating in four years of physics and mathematics at the renowned Federal Polytechnic Academy in Zürich.
After his graduation in the spring of 1900, he became a Swiss citizen, worked for two months as a mathematics teacher, and then was employed as examiner at the Swiss patent office in Bern. With his newfound security, Einstein married his university sweetheart, Mileva Maric, in 1903.
Early in 1905 Einstein published in the prestigious German physics monthly Annalen der Physik a thesis, "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions," that won him a Ph.D. from the University of Zürich. Four more important papers appeared in Annalen that year and forever changed man's view of the universe.
The first of these, "Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen" ("On the Motion--Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat--of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid"), provided a theoretical explanation of Brownian motion. In "Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt" ("On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light"), Einstein postulated that light is composed of individual quanta (later called photons) that, in addition to wavelike behaviour, demonstrate certain properties unique to particles. In a single stroke he thus revolutionized the theory of light and provided an explanation for, among other phenomena, the emission of electrons from some solids when struck by light, called the photoelectric effect.
Einstein's special theory of relativity, first printed in "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper" ("On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies"), had its beginnings in an essay Einstein wrote at age 16. The precise influence of work by other physicists on Einstein's special theory is still controversial. The theory held that, if, for all frames of reference, the speed of light is constant and if all natural laws are the same, then both time and motion are found to be relative to the observer.
In the mathematical progression of the theory, Einstein published his fourth paper, "Ist die Trägheit eines Körpers von seinem Energieinhalt abhängig?" ("Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?"). This mathematical footnote to the special theory of relativity established the equivalence of mass and energy, according to which the energy E of a quantity of matter, with mass m, is equal to the product of the mass and the square of the velocity of light, c. This relationship is commonly expressed in the form E = mc .
Public understanding of this new theory and acclaim for its creator were still many years off, but Einstein had won a place among Europe's most eminent physicists, who increasingly sought his counsel, as he did theirs. While Einstein continued to develop his theory, attempting now to encompass with it the phenomenon of gravitation, he left the patent office and returned to teaching--first in Switzerland, briefly at the German University in Prague, where he was awarded a full professorship, and then, in the winter of 1912, back at the Polytechnic in Zürich. He was later remembered from this time as a very happy man, content in his marriage and delighted with his two young sons, Hans Albert and Edward.
In April 1914 the family moved to Berlin, where Einstein had accepted a position with the Prussian Academy of Sciences, an arrangement that permitted him to continue his researches with only the occasional diversion of lecturing at the University of Berlin. His wife and two sons vacationed in Switzerland that summer and, with the eruption of World War I, were unable to return to Berlin. A few years later this enforced separation was to lead to divorce. Einstein abhorred the war and was an outspoken critic of German militarism among the generally acquiescent academic community in Berlin, but he was primarily engrossed in perfecting his general theory of relativity, which he published in Annalen der Physik as "Die Grundlagen der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie" ("The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity") in 1916. The heart of this postulate was that gravitation is not a force, as Newton had said, but a curved field in the space-time continuum, created by the presence of mass. This notion could be proved or disproved, he suggested, by measuring the deflection of starlight as it travelled close by the Sun, the starlight being visible only during a total eclipse. Einstein predicted twice the light deflection that would be accountable under Newton's laws.
His new equations also explained for the first time the puzzling irregularity--that is, the slight advance--in the planet Mercury's perihelion, and they demonstrated why stars in a strong gravitational field emitted light closer to the red end of the spectrum than those in a weaker field.
While Einstein awaited the end of the war and the opportunity for his theory to be tested under eclipse conditions, he became more and more committed to pacifism, even to the extent of distributing pacifist literature to sympathizers in Berlin. His attitudes were greatly influenced by the French pacifist and author Romain Rolland, whom he met on a wartime visit to Switzerland. Rolland's diary later provided the best glimpse of Einstein's physical appearance as he reached his middle 30s:
Einstein is still a young man, not very tall, with a wide and long face, and a great mane of crispy, frizzled and very black hair, sprinkled with gray and rising high from a lofty brow. His nose is fleshy and prominent, his mouth small, his lips full, his cheeks plump, his chin rounded. He wears a small cropped mustache. (By permission of Madame Marie Romain Rolland.)
Einstein's view of humanity during the war period appears in a letter to his friend, the Austrian-born Dutch physicist Paul Ehrenfest:
The ancient Jehovah is still abroad. Alas, he slays the innocent along with the guilty, whom he strikes so fearsomely blind that they can feel no sense of guilt. . . . We are dealing with an epidemic delusion which, having caused infinite suffering, will one day vanish and become a monstrous and incomprehensible source of wonderment to later generations. (From Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden [eds.], Einstein on Peace; Simon and Schuster, 1960.)
It would be said often of Einstein that he was naïve about human affairs; for example, with the proclamation of the German Republic and the armistice in 1918, he was convinced that militarism had been thoroughly abolished in Germany.
Source: Britannica Encyclopedia
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