Albert Einstein

Introduction

Albert’s Early Years

Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany on Mar. 14, 1879. Einstein's parents, who were non-practicing Jews, moved from Ulm to Munich when Einstein was an infant. The family business was the manufacture of electrical parts. When the business failed, in 1894, the family moved to Milan, Italy. At this time Einstein decided officially to relinquish his German citizenship. Within a year, still without having completed secondary school, Einstein failed an examination that would have allowed him to pursue a course of study leading to a diploma as an electrical engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He spent the next year in nearby Aarau at the cantonal secondary school, where he enjoyed excellent teachers and first-rate facilities in physics. Einstein returned in 1896 to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where he graduated, in 1900 as a secondary school teacher of mathematics and physics.

After two years he obtained a post at the Swiss patent office in Bern. The patent-office work required Einstein's careful attention, but while employed (1902-09) there, he completed an astonishing range of publications in theoretical physics. For the most part these texts were written in his spare time and without the benefit of close contact with either the scientific literature or theoretician colleagues. Einstein submitted one of his scientific papers to the University of Zurich to obtain a Ph.D. degree in 1905. In 1908 he sent a second paper to the University of Bern and became a lecturer there. The next year Einstein received a regular appointment as associate professor of physics at the University of Zurich.

By 1909, Einstein was recognized throughout German-speaking Europe as a leading scientific thinker. In quick succession he held professorships at the German University of Prague and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. In 1914 he advanced to the most prestigious and best-paying post that a theoretical physicist could hold in central Europe, professor at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft in Berlin.

Albert the Romantic

Many people do not think Albert Einstein as a “romantic”, but the truth of the matter is that he was a hopeless romantic. We have seen the examples of his passion for science and learning at early ages most prominent at age ten. As he was growing in to manhood, he found another outlet for his passion. That passion was spawned on by his first wife, a Hungarian woman by the name of Mileva Maric. At the age of nineteen, he fell in love. He met Mileva Maric at ETH (the Federal Polytechnic) were they were classmates. This romantic life also produced the man as a poet, a violinist, a draft dodger, a self-styled bohemian, and a cocky, charismatic whirlwind who left personal and professional chaos in his wake. Four years later, he would have a baby boy and a baby girl with Meliva. Tragically they end up giving their daughter up for adoption and then they lose their son to illness a short time after. Not willing to give up on life at such a young age, Albert and Meliva get married and have another son Hans Albert. A few years later Albert and Meliva give birth to another son, Eduard. Drama falls again on the Einsteins when they move and suddenly get divorced shortly after. Albert few years later becomes deathly ill. He is nursed back to health by his cousin, Elsa. Two years later they fell in love and get married. So you can see that Albert not only had a passion for science, but was also a hopeless romantic.(5)

Albert’s Scientific Accomplishments

In the first of three seminal papers that were published in 1905, Einstein examined the phenomenon discovered by Max Planck, according to which electromagnetic energy seemed to be emitted from radiating objects in quantities that were ultimately discrete. The energy of these emitted quantities, the so-called light-quanta, was directly proportional to the frequency of the radiation. This circumstance was perplexing because classical electromagnetic theory, based on Maxwell's equations and the laws of thermodynamics, had assumed that electromagnetic energy consisted of waves propagating in a hypothetical, all-pervasive medium called the luminiferous ether, and that the waves could contain any amount of energy no matter how small. Einstein used Planck's quantum hypothesis to describe visible electromagnetic radiation, or light. According to Einstein's heuristic viewpoint, light could be imagined to consist of discrete bundles of radiation. Einstein used this interpretation to explain the photoelectric effect, by which certain metals emit electrons when illuminated by light with