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"As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty tolerance, and equality of all citizens before the law prevail."
-- Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein, March 14, 1879 - April 18, 1955.
Albert Einstein, probably best known for his theory of relativity, revolutionized scientific thought with new concepts of space, time, mass, motion, and gravitation. His statement that energy and matter are interchangeable was the key to the development of atomic energy.
Born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879, Einstein grew up in Munich. Unable to find a teaching job after graduating from a technical institute in Zurich, Switzerland, he accepted a post as examiner in the Swiss patent office. He worked there from 1902 in 1909, devoting only his spare time to his own scientific interests.
The year 1905 was a turning point in Einstein's life. He received a doctorate in physics from the University of Zurich and published three scientific papers, each of which became the basis for a new branch of physics.
The first paper described light as a stream of energy particles called "quanta." It explained the already observed photo-electric effect--that beams of light cause metals to release electrons that can be converted into electric current. It was for this work that, in 1921, Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize in physics.
The second paper, on the electrodynamics of moving bodies, contained Einstein's special theory of relativity. The famous equation E=mc2 related mass directly to energy. (A manuscript copy of the paper is housed in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.) The third paper explained Brownian motion--the irregular movement of particles suspended in a liquid or a gas--and showed that such motion is the consequence of fundamental nature of matter.
These papers earned for Einstein a series of professorships in Switzerland and Prague. Then, in 1914, he moved to Berlin as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and director of the Kaiser Wihelm Physical Institute. He was free to teach at the University of Berlin. Despite anti-Semitism which grew steadily after World War I, Einstein held these positions until Hitler came into power.
In 1933, Einstein came to the United States and joined the newly formed Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, New Jersey. He became a citizen of the United States in 1940, was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1942, and remained affiliated with the Institute at Princeton until his death in 1955.
In his later years, Einstein worked actively on behalf of world government and world peace. But he kept his allegiance to science. In a discussion of his political activities, he once said, "... politics is for the present, but an equation ... is ... for eternity." |