Birth: 14th March, 1879
He was born on 14th March, 1879 in the town of Ulm in Wuttemberg but left with his parents when he was a year old and moved to the large south German town of Munich. His father, Hermann Einstein a salesman and engineer started a small electro-chemical factory with his uncle. It was from this uncle, a remarkable man by all accounts, that Albert got his interest in Scientific and Mathematical processes. From his mother Pauline Einstein, who was a musician, he inherited a deep love of music.
Family and Schooling:
The family was Jewish. Albert attended a Catholic Elementary School from the age of 5 for 3 years. At the age of 8, he was transferred to the Luitpold Gymnasium (now known as the Albert Einstein Gymnasium) where he received advanced primary and secondary school education until he left Germany seven years later. When the boy was 15 his father lost money, closed the Munich factory and went south to try his luck in Milan. Then after a second migration, to Switzerland, he found that the Polytechnic Institute in Zurich would have him. In September 1896, he passed the Swiss exam with mostly good grades, including a top grade of 6 in Physics and Mathematical subjects, though he was only 17, he enrolled in the four-year Mathematics and Physics teaching diploma program at the Zurich Polytechnic.
Einstein and His First Love:
The Polytechnic had an international reputation and students flocked to it from all over Europe. One of these was a young girl from Hungary, Mileva Maritsch, They would work together in laboratory long after other students had retired to their lodgings, they became inseparable and within weeks it became tacitly understood that, some day, they would marry. In 1900, Einstein was awarded the Zurich Polytechnic teaching diploma, but Mileva Maritsch failed the examination with a poor grade in the mathematics component, theory of functions.
Marriage and Divorce with Mileva Maritsch:
After graduation, Einstein spent almost two frustrating years searching for a teaching post and after much inquiry he found himself a post in the patent office in Berne. He had come to love the country so he renounced his German nationality and became a Swiss subject. Finally, Einstein and Mileva Maritsch married in January 1903. In May 1904, the couple's first son, Hans Albert Einstein, was born in Bern, Switzerland. Their second son, Eduard, was born in Zurich in July 1910. In 1914, Einstein moved to Berlin, while his wife remained in Zurich with their sons. They divorced on 14 February 1919, having lived apart for five years.
Marriage with Cousin:
Einstein married Elsa Lowenthal on 2 June 1919, after having had a relationship with her since 1912. She was his first cousin maternally and his second cousin paternally. In 1933, they emigrated to the United States. In 1935, Elsa Einstein was diagnosed with heart and kidney problems and died in December 1936.
Einstein and Patent Office:
Much of his work at the patent office related to questions about transmission of electric signals and electrical-mechanical synchronization of time, two technical problems that show up conspicuously in the thought experiments that eventually led Einstein to his radical conclusions about the nature of light and the fundamental connection between space and time.
In 1905 Einstein published papers on the production and transformation of light and on the electro-dynamics of moving bodies. These caused a small stir in the academic world: How could such research come from an official in a patent office???
By 1908, he was recognized as a leading scientist, and he was appointed lecturer at the University of Bern. The following year, he quit the patent office and the lecturership to take the position of physics professor at the University of Zurich.
During 1911, he had calculated that, based on his new theory of general relativity, light from another star would be bent by the Sun's gravity. That prediction was claimed confirmed by observations made by a British expedition led by Sir Arthur Eddington during the solar eclipse of 29 May 1919. International media reports of this made Einstein world famous. On 7 November 1919, the leading British newspaper The Times printed a banner headline that read: "Revolution in Science – New Theory of the Universe – Newtonian Ideas Overthrown." In 1921, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, as relativity was considered still somewhat controversial. He also received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 1925.
Albert Einstein spent twenty years, from 1913 to 1933, in Berlin, working hard on his theory of relativity, thinking it out stage by stage, overcoming its mathematical difficulties, gradually evolving the all-embracing theory which has affected the work ever since of all mathematicians and physicists. His simple-sounding formula, E=mc^2, Which proved the unsuspected equivalence of energy and mass has since been abundantly proved and is responsible, among other things, for the invention of the atomic bomb. The formula shows that small mass can be converted into huge amount of energy, where E is energy, m is mass and c is the speed of light.
Einstein accepted United States Citizenship.....Why???
In February 1933, while on a visit to the United States, Einstein decided not to return to Germany due to the rise to power of the Nazis under Germany's new chancellor, Adolf Hitler. He visited American universities in early 1933 where he undertook his third two-month visiting professorship at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In early April 1933, he learned that the new German government had passed laws barring Jews from holding any official positions, including teaching at universities. A month later, Einstein's works were among those targeted by Nazi book burnings, and Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels proclaimed, "Jewish intellectualism is dead." Einstein also learned that his name was on a list of assassination targets, with a "$5,000 bounty on his head." One German magazine included him in a list of enemies of the German regime with the phrase, "not yet hanged". With so many other Jewish scientists now forced by circumstances to live in America, often working side by side, Einstein wrote to a friend, "For me the most beautiful thing is to be in contact with a few fine Jews—a few millennia of a civilized past do mean something after all." In another letter he writes, "In my whole life I have never felt so Jewish as now." Einstein accepted U.S. citizenship certificate from judge Phillip Forman. Einstein became an American citizen in 1940 after World War-II.
After world war, when his theories were beginning to rock the world, there was haggling as to whose property he was. As he put it himself in a wry, very typical, letter to the press,
“...by an application of the theory of Relativity to the taste of the reader, today in Germany I am called a German man of science; in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be regarded as a bete noire the description will be reversed and I shall become a swiss Jew for the Germans, a German for the English…”
Death of Greatest Man of Science: 17th April, 1955
On 17 April 1955, Albert Einstein experienced internal bleeding caused by the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm. Einstein refused surgery, saying: "I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly." He died in Princeton Hospital early the next morning at the age of 76.
During the autopsy, the pathologist of Princeton Hospital, Thomas Stoltz Harvey, removed Einstein's brain for preservation without the permission of his family, in the hope that the neuroscience of the future would be able to discover what made Einstein so intelligent. Einstein's remains were cremated and his ashes were scattered at an undisclosed location.
In his lecture at Einstein's memorial, nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer summarized his impression of him as a person: "He was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without worldliness ... There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn".
Lastly on his death in Princeton in 1955, universally mourned as the world’s and the century’s, greatest man of science.
Inspirational Quotes by Albert Einstein:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
“A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.”
“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
“Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”
“Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”
“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning.”
“Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.”
“You never fail until you stop trying.”
“Black holes are where God divided by zero.”
“The best way to cheer yourself is to cheer somebody else up.”
“The best way to cheer yourself is to cheer somebody else up.”
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity”
“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.”
“If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.”
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
“God did not create evil. Just as darkness is the absence of light, evil is the absence of God.”
“Nothing happens until something moves.”
“Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.”
“Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work...”
“I never think of the future - it comes soon enough.”
“Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.”
“Imagination is the highest form of research.”
“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.”
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot.”
“A true genius admits that he/she knows nothing.”
“If there is any religion that could respond to the needs of modern science, it would be Buddhism.”
“The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.”
“Information is not knowledge.”
“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”
JAI HIND!
© Deepak Agrawal Blogs 2014
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