His father was Hermann Einstein, an Ashkenazi Jew from Buchau in Wurttemberg. Hermann had been academically gifted and showed a strong ability in the field of applied mathematics when studying in Stuttgart, the capital of Wurttemberg, in his youth. However, the Einstein family were not wealthy and he was forced to abandon his studies and
Went to work in the feather-bed shop run by his cousins, Moses and Hermann Levi, in Ulm in the 1870s. Albert’s mother was Pauline Koch, a member of a family of German Jews who had developed extensive connections as purveyors and merchants in Wurttemberg.
She married Hermann Einstein in 1876 and Albert was their first child. A daughter, Maja or Maria Einstein, was born two years later in 1881. Albert’s youth was dictated to a considerable extent by his father’s business dealings. When he was still an infant Hermann Einstein, following the business advice of his brother
Jakob, decided to move the family to Munich, the largest city in southern Germany lying some 170 kilometres to the east of Ulm. This occurred in 1880 as Jakob and Hermann sought to establish Einstein and Co. as an electrical engineering company in Munich just as the great age of electrification was about
To begin sweeping the western world. There Albert was enrolled in a Catholic elementary school, before being transferred to the Luitpold-Gymnasium in Munich in 1887. Albert remained there until 1894, but at that stage the Einsteins were once again uprooted when Hermann and Jakob failed to secure a contract to begin the electrification of Munich.
Instead they headed for northern Italy, settling first in Milan and then in Pavia. Albert briefly remained in Munich to continue his studies, but after several months became disillusioned with the strict rote learning on offer at the Gymnasium and convinced both
His parents and the school authorities to let him leave to join them in Italy. Albert continued his education in Italy from 1894 onwards. He was already showing distinct signs of a precocious ability as a scientist and mathematician, although his father desired for him to take a more keen interest in applied engineering
And so follow him into the family business. In Munich in the summer of 1891 he had taught himself algebra and the advanced geometry of the ancient Greek mathematician, Euclid. A family tutor by the name of Max Talmud, who excelled himself in the fields of optometry
And ophthalmology, was employed by the Einsteins to teach young Albert advanced mathematics and scientific principles, but he soon found his charge was becoming more knowledgeable than he himself was, when it came to subjects such as calculus, algebra and geometry. Nor was he a prodigy who was solely interested in scientific and mathematical topics.
As he entered his teenage years he was also reading widely of some of the most advanced philosophical writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, notably the German Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, first published in 1781 and offering one of the most analytical
Discussions of metaphysics, the study of the nature of reality, is one of the densest philosophical tracts ever written, yet Albert seemed to understand it clearly at age 14, something which bewildered his tutor. Young Einstein’s abilities did not go unnoticed by his teachers, tutor and parents.
Thus, shortly after he arrived in Pavia and following his sixteenth birthday he was sent to take the entrance exams at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in the city of Zurich, an advanced school of science, mathematics and engineering.
Although he scored high on the technical exams, Albert was not admitted at this time, in part owing to his youth. The following year he passed the Swiss Matura, an equivalency exam in the country for those who had not gone through the formal schooling process within Switzerland, but wished to
Complete the secondary education curriculum there. Earlier that year he had also renounced his German citizenship to avoid being called up for the required military service expected of all young men in the country. Thus it was that as a stateless individual he finally entered the Polytechnic School
In Zurich in the autumn of 1896 aged seventeen. There he would study physics and mathematics, the two subjects which he had demonstrated a prodigious ability in since he was a child. He would remain there for four years, eventually acquiring a diploma in 1900.
Einstein’s years in Zurich were those in which his research interests began to emerge in a fully formed state. He was becoming an eclectic scientist, one who might broadly be categorised as a physicist, but whose area of expertise covered a wide range of topics such as the discovery of an
Accurate way to measure the dimensions of tiny molecules, a field of endeavour belonging to quantum mechanics, the broad science of describing the physical properties of nature at the atomic and subatomic level. Additionally, he was concerned to measure how light moves.
At the time he was beginning to conduct complex research into this subject in turn-of-the-century Zurich, the prevailing view amongst European and North American scientists was that light travelled exclusively in wave-patterns. As would become clear in the years that followed Einstein doubted this theory and believed
A further layer of complexity existed within the mechanism whereby light travelled. These and other aspects of advanced physics were at the heart of Einstein’s research in his mid-twenties. They formed the core of his doctoral thesis which he was studying for part time throughout
The early 1900s and which he completed in 1905 in Zurich, entitled ‘A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions’. His research in the early 1900s was evidently aided by Mileva Maric, a young Serbian mathematician and physicist who had begun attending the Polytechnic School in Zurich around the same
Time that Einstein had first been granted teaching hours there after finishing top of the class in 1899. Maric was one of only two female students attending there at the time. She and Einstein were soon involved in a relationship with each other and it is now assumed that
She contributed to his research, though the exact degree to which she did so is unclear. In any event her own research was interrupted in the summer of 1901 when she fell pregnant. Maric and Einstein were not yet married by then and this was a time when having a child
Out of wedlock was still considered a social scandal. It appears that Mileva returned to her native Serbia to have the child, who was called Lieserl in their correspondence after her birth. What happened to her thereafter is unclear. Some sources believe she died from scarlet fever in 1903, but others suggest she was
Put up for adoption in Serbia. It seems more likely that she died as Maric and Einstein had married in January 1903. They would go on to have two further children, a boy, Hans Albert, born in the summer of 1904, and another son, Eduard, in 1910.
In may seem peculiar in retrospect, but Albert did not immediately find it easy to find a teaching position upon completing his diploma in Zurich in 1900. He spent the next year and a half trying in vain to acquire a junior level lecturing and
Research position in a Central European university, but to no avail. In the meantime, he acquired Swiss citizenship in 1901, finally acquiring statehood after half a decade of theoretically being without a national affiliation. With Swiss citizenship in hand a family friend and associate from the Polytechnic in Zurich,
Max Grossman, enlisted the aid of his father to get Einstein a post at the Swiss Patent Office in the capital Bern. Here Einstein worked as a patent assistant examiner. What this effectively meant was that Albert was tasked with assessing the merits of various
Inventions and devices which were brought before the Patent Office by individuals who wanted to have their intellectual ownership of their invention recognised, to ensure credit for the device was given to them and they could benefit financially. Einstein worked there for the next several years.
Beyond serving to support his young family, his work focused on many different devices involving electrical conduction and mechanics and it has been posited that this impacted on Einstein’s own research during his formative years. The manner in which Einstein burst forth from almost complete obscurity within the developed
World’s scientific community to become one of Europe’s paramount physicists in the mid-1900s is one of the strangest stories in the history of science. While he was completing his doctoral studies and working in the Patent Office in Bern in
The first half of the 1900s Einstein was working on a series of papers for publication in the pages of Annalen der Physik, one of the world’s leading academic journals for the study of physics, which had been published in Germany from 1799 onwards.
This eventually resulted in four separate research papers which were all published in the journal in 1905. Individually they made major contributions to various fields within the study of physics. Collectively they have been deemed to represent a revolutionising of humanity’s conception
Of the molecular and atomic dimensions of the natural world and the development of modern physics. Consequently 1905 is usually referred to by biographers of Einstein and historians of western science as the annus mirabilis, or ‘miracle year’ of Einstein’s career.
The first of Einstein’s four papers of 1905 was entitled ‘On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light’ and was published on the 9th of June. This explained what is known as the photoelectric effect for the first time. The photoelectric effect is where electrons are emitted when electromagnetic radiation,
Such as light, hits off a material or substance. The electrons which are emitted during such a process are called photoelectrons. Up until 1905 when Einstein described this photoelectric effect, the prevailing view amongst physicists was that light travelled much like a wave in the ocean, but Einstein
Explained that the photoelectric effect meant that light also travelled in what he termed to be a finite number of energy quanta, which moved without dividing and which could only be absorbed or generated as entities. This not only explained much that was previously unknown about the nature of light and electrons,
But had fundamental implications for understanding how light of a certain frequency could bring sufficient energy into play to liberate an electron. This built on work conducted by physicists such as Max Planck in previous years, but Einstein’s paper added extensive new details on how energy and light interacted through the photoelectric effect.
This had major implications for practical applied physics and many years later this discovery would be directly cited when Einstein was awarded the Noble Prize for Physics, although it was not until the mid-1920s that his findings were fully accepted amongst physicists.
Just six weeks after this first paper appeared, Einstein’s second paper of 1905, entitled ‘On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid, as Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat’, was published in Annalen der Physik on the 18th of July.
Prior to Einstein’s paper there was no accurate way of measuring the dimensions of molecules, but several scientists in the nineteenth century such as John Dalton had noted that chemical substances tended to combine together or break down in weighted proportions which suggested
That they were all made from an as yet unidentified physical molecule that was common to all things. These unitary molecules are known as atoms today after a word which had been coined by Ancient Greek philosophers of the sixth century BC who were themselves seeking to understand
The nature of existence, two and a half millennia before Einstein’s time. Einstein’s second 1905 paper showed how these atoms could be measured more comprehensively by using what was termed Brownian Motion, whereby particles, in this case pollen, were suspended in a water solution.
Einstein’s paper, along with a corroborating study produced by the French physicist, Jean Perrin, in 1908, demonstrated unequivocally that atoms and molecules were real entities which were the building blocks of existence. Thus, this second paper of 1905 was a major contribution to humanity’s acceptance of
The existence of atoms and molecules and the emergence of atomic theory as the basis of much of twentieth-century physics. Einstein’s third paper was published just over two months later on the 26th of September 1905. This was entitled ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’ and focused on the issue of special relativity.
This sought to reconcile an equation which the Scottish mathematician and scientist, James Clerk Maxwell, had devised in the early 1860s regarding electricity and magnetism. Maxwell’s equations led to difficulties in how physicists should understand mechanics which occurred close to the speed of light.
In response to this problem Einstein outlined his ‘special theory of relativity’ or ‘special relativity’ in his 1905 paper. This stated that the speed of light is the same for all observers regardless of the motion of the light source or the observer of the light source.
This opposed the idea postulated over two centuries earlier by Isaac Newton which held that the speed of light is not fixed. Moreover, Einstein’s special theory of relativity correctly assumed that when two objects are involved concerning light, there is no true way of knowing which is in motion and which is not.
Einstein had come to this realisation while travelling in a streetcar in Bern in the early summer of 1905 and looking at the clock-tower in the centre of the city. He realised that if his car suddenly started travelling at the speed of light the clock-arms
On the clock-tower would suddenly appear as though they had stopped, but the clock inside the streetcar would continue to move around as though nothing had happened because both Einstein and the clock in the streetcar were travelling at the same velocity. Therefore the speed of movement was relative.
If the streetcar had suddenly accelerated to the speed of light it would not mean that the clock-tower had stopped, only that it appeared to have done so relative to the speed which the streetcar was now travelling at. This was the special theory of relativity at work.
Einstein’s fourth and final paper of his annus mirabilis was published on the 21st of November and was entitled ‘Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon its Energy Context’. Few have heard of that title today, but a great many are familiar with the equation which Einstein pioneered in the paper: E=mc2.
In brief what this means is that the energy of a body at rest, defined as E, is equal to its mass, or m, multiplied by the speed of light, the c of the equation, squared. This equivalency equation showed that a massive particle possesses an energy, or ‘rest energy’
Which is distinct from the kinetic energy of a particle. This would come to be known as the Mass-Energy Equivalence and highlights how the ‘rest energy’ of a particle such as the nucleus of an atom could be so massive as to result
In an enormous amount of light and thermal energy being released if the particle was disturbed sufficiently. As we will see, the practical application of this equation was to have devastating consequences in later decades and Einstein later grew to regret this aspect of his research.
Einstein’s four papers published during 1905 did not simply constitute breakthroughs in the confined world of academic theoretical physics. His research shaped the application of science to the modern world in the decades that followed. For instance, when you walk up to an automatic door today and it opens in front of you, this
Is because the sensors used in the doorway react when the photons in the light beams they emit are obstructed, in this case by a moving person. The sensor then tells the door to open. Einstein first explained how photons work. Solar-powered calculators and streetlights that automatically turn on when it gets dark,
Amongst other innovations, also emerged from his work on light. The ‘special theory of relativity’ helped lead to the development of Global Positioning Systems, or GPS, over time. Thus, when you switch on Google Maps it is effectively functioning based partly on research which Einstein published in his annus mirabilis papers.
And when a nuclear power plant creates massive amounts of energy by harnessing the energy in the nucleus of an atom they are doing so based on Einstein’s discoveries concerning energy and mass equivalence as contained in the equation E=mc2. Einstein’s ground-breaking research findings published in 1905 soon came to the attention
Of the European scientific community, though at a time when people were still reliant on the circulation of hard copies of academic journals and word of mouth for research to be disseminated it took a few years for the import of his findings to become clear across Europe. As they did, they transformed his career.
By 1908 he gained a teaching post at the University of Bern and was able to leave his position at the Patent Office. The following year he was appointed to a new chair of theoretical physics which had been created at the University of Zurich. He remained there for the next two years.
During this time, he continued to refine some of the points he had made in his 1905 papers, while also moving on to begin developing the ‘theory of general relativity’ as an offshoot of his work on special relativity. The theory of general relativity holds that the observable gravitational attraction between
Two masses results from the warping of space and time by those two masses. This research made major initial contributions to the science of black holes and other mass objects within the universe. In 1911 Einstein left Switzerland, after over fifteen years there to take up a new position
Which had been offered to him at the Charles Ferdinand University in Prague, the oldest university in what is now Czechia, but which was then a constituent part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In tandem he was offered Austrian citizenship.
Although he spent just over a year there he published upwards of a dozen papers on topics such as the mathematics of radiation, quantum theory and gravitation. Before long a new offer pulled him back to Switzerland. This was an invitation to teach at his old alma mater, the Polytechnic School in Zurich.
He was there by the summer of 1912 and would spend the next year lecturing to classes who were increasingly familiar with the growing fame of the German physicist, while also researching problems on gravitation and molecular heat. Much of this latter work was undertaken in conjunction with Marcel Grossman, the Swiss
Colleague who had attended the Polytechnic with Einstein in the late 1890s and whose family had aided him in acquiring his earlier position at the Bern Patent Office. In the spring of 1913, less than a year after taking up his position in Zurich, Einstein was visited in Switzerland by Max Planck and
Walther Nernst, two of the foremost scientists of the age. Both worked in Berlin and had come to Zurich to convince Einstein to return to the land of his birth to take up a position at the University of Berlin. The post came with automatic membership of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, as well
As his appointment as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. This would allow Einstein to concentrate on his research and build a team of researchers around him. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse and was made more attractive by the prospect of being
Close to his cousin, Elsa, who lived in Germany and whom Einstein had begun corresponding with frequently since the spring of 1912. Thus, early in 1914 Albert made the move to the German capital. His first wife, Mileva, agreed to move at first with their two sons, but she was immediately
Unhappy in Berlin, and sensed Albert was growing closer to his cousin and soon decided to return to Zurich with their children. They remained separated until 1919 when they finally divorced, at which time Einstein married Elsa. By then both she and Albert were in their forties and this second marriage of Einstein’s
Did not result in any further children, though Albert became step-father to Elsa’s two daughters from her previous marriage. Einstein’s arrival in Berlin was immediately interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. For years tensions had been building between the major European powers over issues as disparate
As colonial rivalry in Africa, the vacuum left by the collapse of Ottoman power in the Balkans and the naval race between Britain and Germany. These all coalesced in the summer of 1914 into the outbreak of a pan-European war which soon became a worldwide conflict.
When it erupted, and Germany’s invasion of neutral Belgium as a means of striking quickly at north-eastern France drew widespread international condemnation, a document entitled ‘Manifesto of the Ninety-Three’ and addressed ‘To the Civilized World’ was soon being circulated in Germany.
The move was led by figures like Adolf van Baeyer, the 1905 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Paul Ehrlich, the 1908 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his pioneering work in chemotherapy, and was effectively a letter from dozens of prominent German academics sounding their support for Germany’s war effort.
Einstein, who was a life-long pacifist, refused to sign it and instead, with several other German academics drew up the ‘Manifesto to the Europeans’. This expressed the idea that Europe’s sense of common culture could be harnessed to bring the war to a swift end.
Unfortunately, their hopes were not met and the war was to drag on for four more years of interminable conflict, followed by years more of revolution and civil war across much of the continent. Despite the ongoing war, Einstein was able to commence new research in a concerted manner
In Berlin from 1915 onwards as the initial shock of the outbreak of the war lessened. However, it was not until 1917 that the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was finally established in Berlin with Einstein as its first director. Funding and administrative delays wrought by the war effort had delayed its inception.
He would serve as head of the Institute for the next sixteen years. Meanwhile, in 1916 he was admitted as a member of the German Physical Society, which had been established in 1845 and is the world’s oldest major academic body of physicists.
Foreign honours would also follow in the years ahead, including membership of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1920 and admittance as a foreign member in 1921 to the Royal Society, arguably the world’s most prestigious scientific society and one which dated back to 1660 when it was founded in London.
Such honours aside, Einstein continued to break new ground in his research in the mid-1910s. For instance, in 1916 he hypothesised the existence of gravitational waves, which are effectively ripples in the curvature of space time. These could not be detected using the instrumentation available in the early twentieth century,
But in 2016, a century after Einstein predicted their existence, they were finally confirmed by American scientists. He was also beginning to theorise the existence of what we now know to be black holes, points in space where gravity is so strong that neither light nor particles can effectively escape
From them and which distort space and time. As with so much else, his work on black holes was pioneering and paved the way for many of his successors to produce detailed accounts of the building blocks of the universe later in the twentieth century. He could, however, be mistaken too.
In 1917 he began working on what he termed the ‘cosmological constant’, a theory which supposed the existence of a static universe. Many years later when the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered the recession of nebulae in the universe, Einstein realised his earlier theory of the ‘cosmological constant’
Was incorrect and referred to it as his, quote, “biggest blunder” throughout his career. His other great research project of the war years, though, was far from a blunder. Einstein had been working on the concept of relativity for over a decade and ‘special
Relativity’ was the subject of one of his acclaimed papers of 1905. Yet it was not until the mid-1910s that he began finalising his research on the subject of general relativity. The general theory of relativity outlined the geometric theory of gravitation. This moved far beyond Newtonian ideas concerning gravity to explain gravitational pull and
The full complexity of geometric gravity as it applies to the universe and not just individual planets. There is an ongoing debate as to who actually arrived at the general theory of relativity first, as his contemporary, the German mathematician, David Hilbert, essentially arrived at nearly identical conclusions as Einstein did in the mid-1910s.
As with Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, who both broadly developed the theory of natural selection at the same time in the mid-nineteenth century, both Einstein and Hilbert were in communication with each other and Einstein had visited the University of
Gottingen where Hilbert was working in 1915 to present lectures on his own findings. What seems relatively clear is that Einstein and Hilbert influenced each other sufficiently that they both arrived at the same conclusions concerning general relativity within days of each other in the winter of 1915.
In late 1918 Europe and the wider world began to emerge from the grip of the First World War, although in some countries such as Russia, Hungary, Turkey and Ireland the end of the war saw the commencement of bitter civil wars which eclipsed anything that those countries had seen during the war itself.
Yet with the resumption of some form of normal life academic discourse resumed fully and research began to be disseminated widely again. Thus, Einstein and Hilbert’s work on the general theory of relativity reached a wider audience within the community of Europe and America’s physicists.
As it did there was an increasing appreciation of how ground-breaking their studies were. Then, in the summer of 1919, the theory was confirmed as being accurate by Sir Arthur Eddington, an English astronomer and mathematician, during a solar eclipse. This time the popular newspapers picked up the story, proclaiming that Einstein’s theory
Had overthrown the model of the universe developed by Isaac Newton nearly 250 years earlier. Given all of this, it is perhaps unsurprising that in 1921 the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm decided to award Einstein the Nobel Prize for Physics. They specifically cited his work in discovering the photoelectric effect in his paper from
1905 in the award designation, but it could just as easily have been awarded for a wide range of research findings over the previous fifteen or so years. Receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1921 and the opening up of the world during the boom time
Years of the 1920s after years of war and social discord saw Einstein and Elsa, whom he had just recently married, decide to travel internationally. In early April 1921 they sailed into New York City where the couple were greeted by the
Mayor, John Francis Hylan, and a delegation of some of the most senior members of the city’s Jewish community. Weeks of lectures and receptions followed, notably at Columbia University in New York and Princeton University in New Jersey. Later that month Einstein met President Warren Harding in the White House.
Afterwards they left for a Pacific voyage to the Empire of Japan and then onwards to Singapore and India before reaching the Middle East. There Einstein visited Palestine, which had become subject to a British mandate following the end of the First World War and where the Jewish Zionist movement was attempting to
Establish a new state for the world’s Jews after centuries of being scattered around the globe. Afterwards he returned to Germany, but the 1921 to 1922 trip was the beginning of a pattern of significant trips to different parts of the world.
For instance, in 1925 he visited South America, spending weeks in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, countries which were booming economically and socially in the early twentieth century and where Einstein was revered within the academic community. In the mid-1920s Einstein became involved in a scientific debate which was widely reported on at the time.
This was between himself and Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist who had won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, twelve months after Einstein had been awarded the same honour. A dispute had been building between Einstein and Bohr throughout the mid-1920s over their differing interpretations of quantum theory.
Much of this centred on Bohr’s refusal to believe that photons, which Einstein had first theorised the existence of in 1905, were real. He did not accept that they did exist until 1925 and even then their debates raged on over other elements of their respective views on quantum mechanics.
Debates were held in London and elsewhere between 1922 and 1925, but culminated in a famous academic disputation in 1927 at the Fifth Solvay Conference at the International Solvay Institutes of Physics and Chemistry in Brussels. Here Bohr and Einstein continued their debate, with both figures arguing points which eventually proved to be accurate.
However, beyond the theoretical arguments the Conference is noteworthy for the number of the world’s most accomplished physicists it drew together. Seventeen of the twenty-nine attendees had already or later received Nobel Prize awards, while Einstein and Bohr were joined by figures including Marie Curie, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger.
It points to the sheer level of brilliance of the European scientific community in the interwar period. The late 1920s also saw Einstein re-conceptualising his own theories of the universe. This was in response to the discovery by the American astronomer, Edwin Hubble, of the
Recession of the nebulae, or what is now termed Hubble’s Law. This states that galaxies are moving away from Earth at speeds which are proportionate to the distance they are from the Milky Way. These speeds are always faster, meaning that the further a cosmic body is from the Earth
The faster it will move away from the Earth. These findings, which were made public in 1929, required Einstein to abandon his current theory of the universe at that time, which was known as the cosmological constant, which supposed that the universe was largely static in the way that it expanded, i.e. that the
Cosmos had been expanding since the Big Bang at a relatively constant speed. Hubble’s discoveries forced Einstein to re-evaluate his hypothesis, as it was now clear that the universe was expanding at an ever greater speed. Hubble’s discovery was also partly responsible
For Einstein’s decision to embark on a new journey to the United States in December 1930. He wanted to meet Hubble and thank him for his research, which he duly did in 1931. However, the trip is generally more remembered for Einstein’s visit to California where
The ostensible purpose of the voyage was to take up a two month visiting fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, better known as Caltech today. During this sojourn Einstein ominously noted that science had as much, and perhaps a greater,
Capacity to do harm than to do good within human society, a reference no doubt to the increasing use of technology in warfare, an issue the pacifist Einstein found abhorrent. This same aversion to the growing militarism of the 1930s led Einstein to have an affinity
With the novelist Upton Sinclair and the actor Charlie Chaplin, both of whom he met in Los Angeles during his visit and who were both publicly affirmed pacifists themselves. Einstein’s growing friendship with Chaplin led him to attend the premier of his new film,
City Lights, a silent film which was significant in establishing the romantic comedy genre in American movies. When Albert and Elsa Einstein entered the cinema with Chaplin, Einstein was cheered with the same regard a Hollywood icon could obtain.
It was also the beginnings of a long friendship with Chaplin which saw the actor visit Einstein’s Berlin apartment shortly afterwards and Einstein renewed their acquaintance when he himself returned again to America early in 1933. While Einstein had been holding his positions in Germany and travelling widely in the 1920s
And early 1930s, as his fame and accomplishments increased, the political environment back in his native Germany was changing for the worse. Germany had been mired in political chaos in the aftermath of the First World War, but from 1923 onwards had entered into a period of pronounced prosperity and instability.
That was shattered late in 1929 when the stock markets on Wall Street in New York City crashed and a massive economic depression set in across the developed world. In Germany, as millions lost their jobs and their economic security, a huge proportion
Of the population turned in national elections to the rabidly anti-semitic National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis, under their leader Adolf Hitler. In Reichstag elections in 1932 they became the largest political party in Germany and in the first months of 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of the country.
Within weeks the party effectively turned Germany into a one-party, fascist state. This was extremely ominous for the country’s Jewish population, and individuals like Einstein. In the United States he decided not to return to Germany and instead the Einsteins settled
In America after a brief visit to Antwerp in Belgium where Albert handed his German passport into the German embassy and renounced his citizenship. In Berlin the Nazis had already searched his apartment twice on account of his Jewish heritage
And over the next year or so Jewish academics such as himself were forced out of their positions across Germany. In the United States, following his decision to seek permanent residence there in 1933, Einstein quickly acquired a position at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University in New Jersey.
It was the institution which he would spend the longest portion of his career at, and barring a directorship at Brandeis University in Massachusetts in the mid-1940s, Einstein was primarily associated with Princeton for the remainder of his life. In the mid-to-late 1930s Einstein undertook some further notable work here on the East
Coast of America. A particularly significant engagement resulted from collaboration with Nathan Rosen, a Jewish American physicist. Together Einstein and Rosen produced a model of what a wormhole might look like. Wormholes are theoretical structures which might connect disparate points in space-time together.
At the time that Einstein and Rosen produced their theoretical ‘wormhole bridge’ they were a relatively novel concept, but they have latterly come to form a fundamental aspect of theoretical writings on space travel. In due course they became a mainstay of science fiction writing from the middle of the twentieth century onwards.
While Einstein was teaching in the United States in the 1930s developments were occurring back in his homeland of Germany which would soon have global implications. Following their initial rise to power in 1933 the Nazis had made clear their intent to overturn
The terms of the Treaty of Versailles which had brought the First World War to an end. In the mid-1930s they began rearming Germany, recruiting hundreds of thousands of soldiers into the military and building thousands of tanks, fighter planes and bombers.
Then, beginning in the spring of 1938, the Nazis used diplomatic coercion to annex Austria into a Greater Germany and to seize territory from its other neighbours such as Czechoslovakia and Lithuania. When Hitler then invaded Poland in September 1939 Britain and France determined that they
Could no longer appease the Nazis and declared war on Germany. In the immediate term the government of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not have public support for American involvement in what was deemed within the US to be a European war which it should not involve itself in.
However, when Germany’s ally the Empire of Japan attacked the US Pacific Fleet at rest in Pearl Harbour in Hawaii in December 1941 the United States also entered the Second World War. More than any war in human history it was one which would be shaped by scientific innovation.
Despite his pacifism Einstein was soon involved in correspondence with the US government concerning the growing conflict. Indeed this had commenced weeks before the war erupted in Europe. Early in 1939 European physicists had discovered nuclear fission using uranium. With this discovery the theoretical possibility of developing a nuclear bomb of some kind
Moved ever closer. A number of European physicists, foremost amongst which was the Hungarian Leo Szilard, realised exactly how possible it now was that a dedicated research team could develop a nuclear warhead. This deeply worried many European scientists, as many of the continent’s leading physicists
Worked in Germany and could be co-opted into helping the Nazis develop a nuclear weapon, one which Hitler and his accomplices would have little compunctions about using as a conventional weapon of war despite its absolutely cataclysmic capacity for the loss of human life.
Consequently, Szilard and two fellow Hungarian physicists, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, composed a letter to the US government warning of the risks of the Nazis developing a nuclear weapon before any other state. They sent this to America where Einstein appended his signature to it before it was sent to
The administration of President Roosevelt. What has become known as the Einstein-Szilard Letter was influential in the months that followed in the US initiating its own programme to develop a nuclear weapon. The Manhattan Project, the US government’s programme to develop a nuclear weapon, was
Initiated on a piecemeal basis late in 1939, just weeks after the receipt of the Einstein-Szilard Letter. This ran enormously against Einstein’s own pacifist inclinations, though the possibility of the Nazis acquiring such a weapon before the US had forced him into warning the government of the dangers of this occurring.
This aside, he viewed war of any kind as a disease which should be resisted by all of civil society in the modern world. Accordingly he did not play a role in the Manhattan Project itself. Rather it was led by Robert Oppenheimer, an American theoretical physicist.
Though its activities were limited between 1939 and 1941, once the United States entered the war in December 1941 funding and resources increased enormously, particularly so as it became increasingly apparent that the Nazis were in fact trying to develop super-weapons
Such as a nuclear bomb at various installations in Europe, notably in Norway where what is known as ‘heavy water’ was being produced, a form of hydrogen with different nuclear properties which could conceivably be used to manufacture a nuclear weapon. The research here, though, was slow and was scuppered on numerous occasions by sabotage
Missions launched by British Special Forces and Free Norwegian fighters. By that time the Manhattan Project was employing upwards of 130,000 people in the United States and a nuclear reactor had been demonstrated in Chicago as early as 1942. Eventually, in mid-July 1945 the world’s first nuclear device was detonated in the
Desert of New Mexico. By the time the first nuclear weapon was detonated the Second World War had already been over in Europe for several weeks. However, because of the agreed Allied policy of leaving the conclusion of the war in the
Pacific against the Empire of Japan until after Nazi Germany had been defeated, the conflict was still raging there by the summer of 1945. Accordingly the administration of President Harry Truman quickly decided to use the new weapon against Japan in the belief that doing so would ultimately save over a million lives
If it forced Japan to surrender quickly. Thus, on the 6th of August 1945 the first nuclear weapon used in warfare was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, killing upwards of 75,000 people on the first day and a further 60,000 or so in the months that followed, from radiation sickness.
Three days later a second nuclear device of a slightly different kind was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, killing upwards of 80,000 people across the initial destruction zone and as a result of the after effects. Japan did quickly surrender, but Einstein was appalled by the ferocity of the attacks
And the fallout from them. Shortly after the bombings he declared that, “The time has come now, when man must give up war. It is no longer rational to solve international problems by resorting to war.” He subsequently expressed his regret that his research on the molecular structure of
The world and the concept of mass energy and equivalence, which he had first published in 1905, had contributed towards the development of the nuclear weapons. The post-war years saw Einstein continue to research and publish, though by then he was nearing his seventies and the pressures of his public profile and some health concerns
Restricted how much he could accomplish. Nevertheless, at Princeton in the late 1940s he developed what he referred to as his Unified Field Theory, findings which he published in Scientific American in 1950 as ‘On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation’. This Unified Field Theory sought to develop a single, unified theoretical framework which
Could be used to understand the fundamental forces of nature and the universe. Efforts had been undertaken by many physicists throughout the first half of the twentieth century to develop such a unified theory, but none had met with acceptance across the academic community.
Einstein’s theory attempted to incorporate elements of his work on general relativity, electromagnetism and gravity and proposed a single origin for the entire set of physical laws, one which could unify forces such as gravitation, electromagnetic forces and even the curvature of space-time with which much of Einstein’s work in the 1930s had been concerned.
Ultimately his work and that of others in developing such a unified theory were unsuccessful, but his research in this respect is nevertheless regarded as being consequential in the further development of differential geometry, the study of the geometry of smooth shapes and surfaces, particularly as they apply to space.
The years following the end of the Second World War in America also saw Einstein acquire a form of celebrity within mainstream society which was largely unprecedented for a theoretical physicist. In many ways this went back all the way to the early 1920s and Einstein’s first arrival in New York City.
His theory of relativity had just been confirmed by other scientists, changing our fundamental understanding of the universe, while Einstein was the recipient of the Nobel Prize. The New York Times had run a story in December 1919 proclaiming that Einstein had, quote, “destroyed space and time,” through his research findings.
Here was the most fundamental overhaul of human thought since Charles Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection a half a century earlier, but Einstein’s work was greeted with applause whereas Darwin’s had been viewed as sacrilegious. His associations with figures like Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood and his increasingly
Iconic physical appearance all made him a more identifiable figure in the years that followed. Most tellingly, by the 1940s it was becoming apparent how Einstein’s revolutionary ideas were changing society and the world in practical ways, not just from the perspective of theoretical physics.
As all of this occurred he became a figure as feted within American society as Stephen Hawking later would be in the second half of the twentieth century, or figures like James Lovelock and Richard Dawkins in the early twenty-first century.
By the time his working life came to an end Einstein’s written and published output was enormous. Though it may seem unusual to many, Einstein’s primary academic output was in the shape of papers in academic journals, of which there were nearly 300 over a span of 55 years, rather than books.
This was and remains the primary means of communicating research for academics working in the hard sciences. Such books as Einstein authored, of which there were over a dozen, were generally reproductions of work he had already published as academic papers, the idea being to tie together his
Existing work on general relativity and other topics or to try to make the material more accessible to a general audience. Some of these were used as advanced undergraduate and postgraduate textbooks for students of theoretical physics for years to come in universities. Additionally, translations were made into multiple languages, ensuring that Einstein’s
Work was accessible in dozens of countries by the middle of the twentieth century. Beyond this academic output, Einstein was a voracious correspondent and at the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem there are over 3,500 pages of his private correspondence dating from 1912 to 1955.
He also wrote widely on various political, philosophical, religious and humanitarian issues, Unsurprisingly, collected editions of Einstein’s work, correspondence and other writings, such as those published since the late 1980s by the academic press of Princeton University, the university where Albert spent nearly all of his career in the United States,
Have stretched into dozens of lengthy volumes. The individual who produced this enormous body of work was, despite his brilliance and celebrity, a resoundingly modest individual. He once proclaimed of himself, quote, “I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.”
He never acquired the trappings of wealth or fame and indeed visitors to his home in Berlin in the 1920s or America in the post-1933 period were generally struck by the modesty of the abode, where the most lavish adornment was usually a piano so that Einstein could play the classical music he loved.
His family life, it must be admitted, was difficult. His two biological sons went to live with their mother after she and Albert separated in 1914 and thereafter their relationship was somewhat distant. Hans later immigrated to the United States in 1938, where they reconnected, but Eduard
Remained in Europe and despite maintaining a correspondence with his father never saw him again after Albert left for America in the early 1930s. Eduard later developed psychiatric problems and was institutionalised in Zurich. Albert’s marriage to Elsa was also strained long before her death in New Jersey in 1936
And it has been widely speculated that Einstein retreated into his scientific inquiries at times as a substitute for his own weaknesses when it came to emotional relationships. Politically, he was humane, holding a lifelong aversion to violence and war.
He deeply admired Mahatma Gandhi and his non-violent opposition to British rule in India and the two became correspondents. Over time his political views moved towards a criticism of capitalism and advocacy of socialism, while he also wrote on numerous occasions about the desire for a system of
Global government and an end to competition between nation states. He held positive views of the United States, deeming the country to be a meritocracy, but the FBI had developed a dossier on him before he ever fully relocated to America from Europe
And by the mid-1950s it ran to over 1,400 pages, a not wholly unusual development for a former German and an academic in post-war America. An intrinsic part of Einstein’s character was his Jewish heritage, though he himself was a professed agnostic and viewed the Bible as a collection of “primitive legends”.
His Jewish heritage also shaped his life from the 1930s onwards as it saw him relocate to the United States in the face of the Nazi threat. Einstein also became noted in his later years for his support for Zionism and the state of Israel.
He had visited Palestine back in the 1920s when it was being governed as a British mandate in the aftermath of the First World War. At that time hundreds of thousands of Jews were already living in or migrating to the
Region with the goal of reforming a Jewish state after nearly 2,000 years of being dispersed around the world. In 1925 Einstein agreed to be listed amongst the first Board of Governors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem when it was established that year.
Then in the aftermath of the Second World War hundreds of thousands of Europe’s Jews who had survived the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis during the Second World War headed for the Holy Land. When the British mandate there expired in March 1948 the Jewish people declared a new
State of Israel for the Jewish people in the Levant. In 1952 Einstein was offered the ceremonial position of President of the country, though he declined on account of his age and inability to leave the United States at that stage. Einstein remained supportive of the Zionist movement until his death but one wonders what
The pacifist in him would have made of the Israeli state as it descended into interminable warfare with its Muslim neighbours from the Suez Crisis of 1956 onwards. By the time Israel entered into the Suez Crisis or the Second Arab-Israeli War against its southern neighbour Egypt in 1956, Einstein had died.
Shortly after the end of the Second World War he had begun to suffer from an abdominal aortic aneurysm, an enlargement of the abdominal aorta, the largest artery in the abdomen. It can become blocked, much like any other part of the circulatory system owing to high blood pressure, high cholesterol and smoking.
Einstein had the issue operated on successfully in 1948 by reinforcing the aorta wall, but despite improving his lifestyle, including adopting a vegetarian diet, the problem resurfaced again early in 1955 when the aorta ruptured, causing internal bleeding. He was admitted to hospital on the 17th of April, but refused emergency surgery to try
To intervene to stop the bleeding, proclaiming philosophically that it was best to meet death with dignity when one’s time had come. He died the following day on the 18th of April 1955 at 76 years of age. The surgeon who carried out his autopsy afterwards removed Einstein’s brain for scientific
Study, though this was done without the permission of his family. It was subsequently dissected and the remains of it are today found in the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington D.C., while some sections were put on display in the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia in 2013.
It has been suggested that the abnormal number of glial cells in his brain might account for Einstein’s inordinate aptitude for mathematical equations. His body was cremated shortly after his death in New Jersey and his ashes were modestly scattered at an undisclosed location.
Albert Einstein was one of the most influential thinkers in the history of science. So significant were his findings in his research over a span of half a century that his surname has become synonymous with elevated intelligence. Perhaps what is most unusual about this is that it all sprang from relatively humble beginnings.
In the 1890s he was effectively an international nomad when he was still a teenager and young man, moving between his native Germany, Italy and Switzerland as his parents tried to balance their financial and business situation with their awareness of their son’s precocious abilities as a mathematician and physicist.
His time at the Polytechnic School in Zurich provided some stability, but Central Europe’s universities saw fit not to hire him when he completed his initial studies there and instead he spent several years working in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern.
It was here, while evaluating inventions during the day, and starting a young family, that he began working on some of the most significant research in the field of physics ever undertaken. The result, in the annus mirabilis of 1905, were four ground-breaking studies which revolutionised
Humanity’s understanding of the nature of the universe, at once revealing the existence of photons and the nuclear and atomic building blocks of existence. 1905 changed everything. In the years that followed Einstein was promoted year on year to ever more significant academic
Positions, until he eventually reached the peak of European academia in Berlin just as the First World War broke out. In the midst of that calamitous conflict he developed the general theory of relativity. In 1921 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work, though more accolades followed in the decades ahead.
What is perhaps most notable about Einstein’s career, however, from the 1920s onwards is the public profile he developed. Visits to the United States, South America, across Europe and the Middle East allowed him to advocate on behalf of a number of causes.
The most significant was his ringing of the alarm bells about the threat posed by Nazi Germany from 1933 onwards. Indeed he immediately renounced his German citizenship when Hitler seized power and moved to the United States. There he continued to note the dangers posed by the possibility of the Nazis acquiring a nuclear weapon.
However, it was a double-edged sword for Einstein the pacifist, for the cost of seeing Nazi Germany defeated in the nuclear race was seeing the US drop its own atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
In the aftermath of the war he used his position to advocate on behalf of a state for the Jewish people in the Middle East following the Holocaust. When he died in 1955 he was the most acclaimed scientist in the world, one who ultimately
Influenced the entire fields of physics, mathematics and cosmology in the modern era. The history of the twentieth century might well have been significantly different had it not been for Einstein. What do you think of Albert Einstein? Was he the most revolutionary intellectual in modern history and what might explain his inordinate intellect?
Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
