Albert Einstein 18 x 24 Acrylic on Cradled Board
Albert Einstein was born in March 14, 1879 in the city of Ulm, Germany, situated on the Danube River in the state of Wurttemberg. He came from a secular Jewish family of the middle class. His father Hermann was a salesman and an engineer; his uncle was the founder of a Munich electrical manufacturing company. It is commonly thought that Albert did not talk until he was 3, or 4, or 5, but there is no evidence of this or that he suffered from a learning disability. Albert attended a Catholic elementary school in Munich and was an excellent student (not a poor one as if often asserted). At the age of 8 he began studying at the Luitpold Gymnasium. There, however, he failed to impress his teachers and chafed at the regimentation and the rote style of teaching practiced. Bored by the curriculum, the young Einstein, a mathematics prodigy, pursued studies on his own. He taught himself calculus when he was only 12 years old. At 13 he immersed himself in Emmanual Kant’s difficult treatise, Critique of Pure Reason and the writings of Charles Darwin. When he was 15, Einstein was asked to leave the school, for he was setting a bad example for the other students.
At the early age of 16 Albert Einstein applied for admission to the Federal Institute of Technology (also called Polytechnic) in Zurich, Switzerland, but he was rejected, failing the tests in biology, zoology, and languages. The following year, though, after completing his secondary education in a school in Aarau, Switzerland, he passed the tests. In September 1896 he was enrolled in the Zurich Polytechnic, a four-year college where he hoped to qualify as a math and physics teacher. To evade military service (he was a lifelong pacifist) Einstein renounced his German citizenship in January of 1896. In 1901 he became a Swiss citizen.
Of the six students who were taking Einstein’s course of study was a Serbian woman, Mileva Marić (1875-1948), born of a wealthy family. Intellectually brilliant, she struck up a friendship with Einstein; they shared a keen interest in physics. In time the friendship grew into something more: Mileva became pregnant by Einstein in 1901. Interrupting her education, she moved temporarily back to Serbia where a daughter, Lieserl was born. When she was one year old, Lieserl contracted scarlet fever and later died, although this is not certain: she may have survived and adopted by a Serbian family. At any rate, it is likely Einstein never saw his daughter.
Mileva, failing her exams twice, put aside her career in science to marry Albert Einstein in January 1903. (There have been claims that Mileva assisted and collaborated with her husband on his studies during their marriage, but this is unlikely: Albert seemed a traditional husband and little drawn to collaboration). Albert and Mileva would have two sons, Hans Albert, born in May 1904 and Eduard, born in July 1910. Hans Albert, who died in 1973, became a hydraulic engineer and was recognized as an expert in his field. He emigrated to America after the Nazi takeover of Germany and during the war worked for the US Department of Agriculture. Later, he taught at the University of California. The younger son, Eduard, was committed to studying medicine. However, at the age of 20, he had a mental breakdown and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Drug and electroshock therapy did little to improve his condition and he suffered from mental illness the rest of his life. His mother cared for him until her death in 1948, after which he was placed in a psychiatric clinic in Zurich, where he died in 1965. Albert dutifully corresponded with his son during his lifetime.
After his graduation in 1900, the 21 year-old Albert Einstein spent a couple frustrating years searching for a permanent teaching position. Eventually he settled instead upon a job in Bern at the Swiss Patent Office, where, as an assistant examiner, he evaluated patent applications. This furnished him with an income to support a family and time to pursue his own studies.
The year 1905 was Einstein’s annus mirabilis (miracle year), when he established himself as one of the world’s foremost scientists. Firstly, he completed his doctoral thesis, A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions, and was awarded a PhD by the University of Zurich. Then he published no less that four significant papers that would revolutionize physics and change forever man’s concept of the universe. These concerned the following subjects:
The Photoelectric effect is the phenomenon by which light causes the emission of electrons. To explain certain anomalies in existing theory, Einstein postulated that light is not composed of waves, but of photons, particles that convey electromagnetic energy, but which, at rest, have no mass.
Brownian motion is the random movement of particles suspended in a fluid or gas. Einstein explained the phenomenon as attributable to the molecules of the fluid striking the particles and causing them to move. Although this was not confirmed experimentally until 1908, Einstein’s explanation provided evidence for the long theorized existence of molecules and atoms as the building blocks of matter.
In his papers on the Special Theory of Relativity, which explains what happens when bodies are in uniform motion at a constant speed and direction, and his paper on Mass-energy equivalence Einstein presented conclusions that exploded the long-accepted theories of physics put forward by Isaac Newton in the 17th Century. He asserted that he laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating observers, for example, light moves at a constant speed irrespective of the motion of observers. (This is counter-intuitive, but demonstrably true). The theory removed the necessity for the existence of ether, which scientists long believed was a medium necessary for light’s propagation. Einstein asserted that light, unlike sound, could travel through a vacuum. He postulated the existence of a space-time continuum, a fourth dimension beyond height, width, and depth. Also, he claimed that time is relative: an event may occur at a different time to one observer than to another. Speed causes time dilation, a moving body experiences a slower passage of time than a body at rest, in proportion to its speed. Space-time can be curved by the force of gravity of massive objects; sunlight can be bent by them. Matter and energy are merely forms of the same stuff and that, under certain conditions, one can change into the other. Energy can be released by the splitting of an atom (fission) or by the merging of atomic nuclei (fusion). He offered the now famous equation E = mc2, that is, energy is mass times the speed of light squared, illustrating that a large amount of energy can be released by a small amount of matter. The speed of light is constant. A moving body acquires more mass as it nears the speed of light, at which point its mass would become infinite, with infinite energy required to continue its movement. Consequently nothing can move faster than the speed of light.
For these remarkable scientific papers the 26-year old Einstein received a huge amount of recognition and was now regarded as one of the world’s leading scientists. And he received the teaching offers he had desired. In 1908 he became a lecturer at the University of Bern, in 1909 an associate professor at the University of Zurich, and a full professor in 1911 at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary. From 1912-14 he taught at Zurich’s Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, but then moved to Berlin to teach at the Berlin University and, in 1917, to serve as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics.
Among other areas of study, Einstein revisited his Special Theory of Relativity and, in 1915, added to it ten field equations describing the interaction of gravity in a space-time continuum that has been curved by energy and mass. These comprise the heart of his General Theory of Relativity. They theory predicts the existence of gravity waves and black holes, areas of the universe whose density is so great that light cannot escape from them. It also presents the concept, significant in astrophysics, that the gravity of massive bodies can actually bend light. This part of relativity was recognized as experimentally provable. Light from distant stars would be bent when passing near our sun and the effect would be revealed by photography — but only during a total solar eclipse when stars near the sun in the sky were visible. During the eclipse of May 29, 1919 a team led by English astronomer Arthur (later Sir Arthur) Eddington took photographs of stars in the constellation Taurus from an observatory on the island of Principe, off the coast of west Africa. Although the pictures were of poor quality, they seemed to show the bending of light that Einstein’s theory had predicted. When the results were published, the Newtonian model of the universe was smashed and Einstein would now be world famous as the creator of a new physics. Even so, elements of relativity were not universally accepted, and so when Albert Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics it was not for his controversial relativity theories, but for his work explaining the photoelectric effect.
In 1914 Einstein’s wife Maríc left him when she discovered that Albert, when they were living in Berlin, had become romantically involved with his divorcée cousin Elsa Einstein Lowenthal. (Elsa’s mother was the sister of Albert’s mother and her father was a cousin of Albert’s father). Albert and Maríc divorced in February of 1919 and a few months later the 40-year old Albert married the 42-year old Elsa. She was his supportive wife, protector, and gatekeeper. When she became fatally ill, Albert was distraught, but rather than being at her side he immersed himself in work so he wouldn’t have to brood over her suffering. Heart and kidney ailments took Elsa’s life in December 1936.
During the the 1920s Einstein, an international celebrity, toured the world and was received with acclaim wherever he went, England, Spain, the United States, Palestine, even the Far East. He wrote of his travels, expressing positive views of America and Japan, but negative views of China that would be regarded today as racist. In 1930 Einstein returned to America, where he was treated like royalty or a movie star. He travelled not only to New York but to California, where, in Hollywood, he struck up a fast friendship with great English comedian, actor, and film auteur Charlie Chaplin, a fellow pacifist. (Chaplin would visit him in Germany).
Einstein was visiting America again in February of 1933 when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany. Einstein had no attention of living under a fascist regime and realized that he as a Jew and a propagator of the new “Jewish” science he would no longer have a place in German society and would even be in physical danger. He learned that his property in Germany had already been confiscated and that the cottage he owned was being converted into a Nazi Youth camp. And so in March of 1933 he turned his passport into the Germany consulate at Antwerp, Belgium, thus renouncing his German citizenship. As a refugee, Einstein would live temporarily in Belgium and England. While the Nazi government burned his books and placed a price on his head, Einstein was more concerned about the other Jewish scientists and teachers in Germany who were now unemployed and subject to persecution. While in England, he asked for help from an anti-Nazi member of parliament, Winston Churchill. Churchill, who would become Britain’s Prime Minister during World War II, used his influence to bring many Jewish scientists to England. Einstein lobbied other governments for assistance. Another country that responded positively was Turkey, which received over a thousand Jewish scientists.
When plans for him to be granted British citizenship fell through, Einstein decided to immigrate to the United States, whose values and freedoms, and whose encouragement of individual achievement and creativity he greatly admired. He had been tendered an offer from Princeton University in New Jersey to join it as a resident scholar at its Institute for Advanced Study. Turning down other offers from universities in Europe, Einstein accepted the position at Princeton in 1935. Happy to settle there permanently, Einstein applied for American citizenship, which was granted in 1940.
At Princeton Einstein primarily worked on formulating equations that would establish a provable unified field theory that would bring into a single framework the four universal and fundamental forces, the strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism. (It had long since been discovered that electricity and magnetism were related). He also worked on reinterpreting quantum physics, which attempts to describe the behavior of atomic and subatomic particles. It had been developed as a distinct branch of science in the mid 1920s by Niels Bohr, a nuclear physicist from Denmark and Werner Heisenberg, a German scientist who was his student. (Heisenberg is also famous for his uncertainty principle, which states that the more precisely the position of a particle can be known, the less precisely can its momentum be determined, and vice versa). At a 1941 war-time meeting between Heisenberg and his old teacher Bohr in Copenhagen, there was established the accepted interpretation of quantum physics, an interpretation that Einstein sought to refute. Despite working on both projects over the next twenty years, Einstein produced few results.
Albert Einstein did not demure to speak out about the political and social issues of his new country. He used his fame for good causes, but at the same time retained an endearing, child-like innocence. He decried racism and was a member of the NAACP. He campaigned actively and vocally for civil rights and social justice. He also promoted Jewish causes. (A non-observant Jew, he believed in the concept of a God, but not in a personal one). After World War II, he supported the founding of the nation of Israel and, in 1952, was offered the ceremonial role of president, which he reluctantly declined. Einsteins’ political views were quite far left. He favored socialism and a world government; his criticism of capitalism led the suspicious FBI to keep a substantial file on him.
A refuge from his work and all the demands placed upon him was his music, for which he long had great affection. He was a more than competent classical violinist and declared that he found great personal pleasure in playing. Once in a while he had the opportunity to perform with professionals; he did not embarrass himself.
In late 1938 Germans scientists had achieved nuclear fission of the radioactive element uranium. When it was discovered that this fission (the splitting of the atomic nucleus) could result in a chain reaction and a powerful release of energy, it was theorized that it could fuel a bomb of tremendous power. Many thought that Germany was not a threat to build a bomb because it did not possess the requisite quantity of the uranium isotope U-235, which is needed for fission. But, in fact, by April 1939 Germany had taken the first, faltering steps toward the establishment of a nuclear weapons program.
In 1939 a group of Hungarian scientists led by physicist Leó Szilárd and including Edward Teller, later the father of the H-bomb, endeavored to warn the United States government of Germany’s ambition to build an atomic bomb. The Hungarians, though, found they lacked sufficient clout to be listened to seriously. Szilárd approached Albert Einstein, whom he had known and worked with in the mid 1920s — they had invented a refrigerator together. Einstein hadn’t even considered the possibility of an atomic bomb and was alarmed by the thought of Hitler possessing such a weapon. He volunteered to help make the government aware of this potentially catastrophic situation. A letter to President Roosevelt urging that the United States, in self-defense, initiate its own nuclear program, was composed, and Einstein signed it. The Einstein-Szilárd letter was delivered on August 9, 1939. President Roosevelt received it and realizing its importance, acted on it. Eventually the Manhattan Project was established. Its goal, the development of an atomic bomb, was achieved in July 16, 1945 when the first nuclear weapon was detonated in White Sands, New Mexico. On August 5th and 9th, respectively, two types of atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulting in devastating destruction, precipitating a Japanese surrender, and bringing World War II to an end.
Albert Einstein, whose pacifist views made him a security risk, did not work on the Manhattan Project or on any other project connected with the war — nor did he wish to. It may seem odd that he was not eager to actively join the fight against a nation that was committed to exterminating his race, but Einstein felt it would be a violation of his staunchly held pacifist principles. In later life he even half regretted his signal contribution to the war effort, the letter to Roosevelt.
In later life Einstein was revered and beloved and was the icon of the benign, wise scientist, an exemplar of humanity. He remained at Princeton University and worked even as he entered the hospital on April 17, 1955 for treatment of a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm. Surgery was recommended for his condition, but Einstein refused, 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 did so, passing away the next day, on April 18, 1955. His body was cremated and his remarkable brain was preserved.
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