Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a renowned physicist known for his theory of relativity, which revolutionized the understanding of space, time, and gravity. His famous equation, E=mc^2, demonstrated the equivalence of mass and energy. Einstein's work laid the foundation for modern physics and had a profound impact on our understanding of the universe.
8 Key excerpts on "Albert Einstein"
- Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Dover Publications(Publisher)
...Einstein’s fame rests on his two published theories and on the astronomical observations of physical phenomena which confirmed them. He has overthrown a universe which endured for three centuries and in its place has constructed a new one, incapable of comprehension to man’s senses but subject to imprisonment and expression within the symbols of Einstein’s mathematical formulas. He has destroyed the hitherto existing foundations of all physical science; he has added another dimension to the universe—time; and he has introduced us to this new universe which, perhaps within the span of another four or five generations, will become as commonplace to the ordinary man as is the present one. Save in such elementary examples by which the newspaper public has been instructed, no simple, general statement of Einstein’s theories is possible and no attempt to define it need here be made. For the reader who is interested, there are several good analyses in English which meet the demands of the non-technical, lay student. What is important to mention, however, is the fact that the central idea of his work is a problem which has long occupied the minds of philosophers. Relativity, in itself, is not a new idea. The problem has been recognized for generations and the mind of man has long wrestled with its implications. But there is a vast difference between the philosopher who says “My idea of the world is the real world. But my neighbor has his own idea of the world and to him his idea is equally real. Hence there is no reality, only an idea of reality which each man makes for himself,” and the theory propounded by Einstein which for the first time gives scientific validity to this conception by establishing its mathematical proofs. This is perhaps the clearest demonstration of the fact that Einstein is the imaginative thinker first and the scientist second...
eBook - ePubThe Albert Einstein Collection Volume Two
Essays in Science, Letters to Solovine, and Letters on Wave Mechanics
- Albert Einstein(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Philosophical Library/Open Road(Publisher)
...A Biography of Albert Einstein Albert Einstein (1879–1955) is among modern history’s greatest and most influential minds. He authored more than 450 scholarly works during his lifetime, and his advancements in science—including the revolutionary Theory of Relativity and E = mc 2, which described for the first time the relationship between an object’s mass and its energy—have earned him renown as “the father of modern physics.” Born in Ulm, in southwest Germany, Einstein moved to Munich with his family as an infant. As a child, Einstein spoke so infrequently that his parents feared he had a learning disability. But despite difficulties with speech, he was consistently a top student and showed an early aptitude for mathematics and physics, which he later studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich after renouncing his German citizenship to avoid military service in 1896. After graduation, Einstein married his college girlfriend, Mileva Marić, and they had three children. He attended the University of Zurich for his doctorate and worked at the patent office in Bern, a post he left in 1908 for a teaching position at the University of Bern, followed by a number of professorships throughout Europe that ultimately led him back to Germany in 1914. By this time, Einstein had already become recognized throughout the world for his groundbreaking papers on special relativity, the photoelectric effect, and the relationship between energy and matter. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. In 1933, Einstein escaped Nazi Germany and immigrated to the United States with his second wife, Elsa Löwenthal, whom he had married in 1919. He accepted a position at Princeton University in New Jersey, where he stayed for the remainder of his life. At Princeton, Einstein dedicated himself to finding a unified field theory and played a key role in America’s development of atomic weapons...
eBook - ePub- Jimena Canales(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Simply Charly(Publisher)
...1 A Previously Unknown Physicist Becomes World Famous A lbert Einstein (1879–1955) was a little-known university professor working in Berlin until one day everything changed for him. He was catapulted to fame on November 7, 1919, when a solar eclipse proved his general theory of relativity—a contribution that continues to be one of the most successful discoveries of all time, one that has been confirmed over and over again by numerous experiments. From that day onward he would become a celebrity-scientist: a widely consulted oracle who commented on a dizzying variety of topics, human and non-human. Einstein is still one of the most famous persons in history. He has graced the covers of TIME magazine no less than four times, more than any other scientist so far. His work has stood the test of time just as much as his image. The man and his work are essential to western civilization, both symbolically and practically. Throughout the first three decades of Einstein’s life, almost no one, aside from some close supporters, considered him a genius. How and why did this perception change so dramatically almost overnight? News stories about Einstein appeared on the first Friday of November 1919 and proliferated shortly thereafter. Journalists credited him with revolutionizing not only physics, but also everyday notions of time and space. The first headline of The Times of London read “REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE/ NEW THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE/ NEWTONIAN IDEAS OVERTHROWN.” The next Saturday the newspaper followed up with “THE REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE/ EINSTEIN v. NEWTON/ VIEWS OF EMINENT PHYSICISTS.” Two days later, the New York Times received a special cable from London...
eBook - ePubA Theory of Everything (That Matters)
A Short Guide to Einstein, Relativity and the Future of Faith
- Alister E McGrath(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Hodder Faith(Publisher)
...The men who have laid the foundations of physics on which I build are Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, and Lorentz. 13 Hoping to counter the loose and lazy language of a ‘revolution’ in science, Einstein made it clear he considered his theories to be ‘the natural completion’ of the work of earlier physicists, so that his new approach was to be seen as representing an ‘orderly transition’ to a better way of seeing our world. 14 Einstein consistently emphasised his continuity with the theories of his precursors, such as Newton in the seventeenth century and James Clerk Maxwell in the nineteenth. Einstein thus did not regard his special theory of relativity as revolutionary but as a systematic development of earlier approaches. Yet the conventions and agendas of popular journalism led to his being portrayed as a revolutionary thinker who had overthrown an existing scientific orthodoxy in much the same way as Russian revolutionaries had toppled the tsar and established a radically different world. Yet while British and American readers lionised Einstein as a scientific genius, others took decidedly more negative attitudes – above all, back in Germany. German Physics: The Campaign against Einstein In 1919, Einstein was a German citizen occupying a senior position at the prestigious University of Berlin and was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. He was at the heart of the German scientific establishment and had become – largely through the influence of Eddington – an international celebrity. Such adulation was echoed in the Berliner Tageblatt, which proclaimed that Einstein was a genius who had uncovered ‘a highest truth, beyond Galileo and Newton, beyond Kant’. Finally, on 14 December 1919, the front page of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung was given over to an image of Einstein, proclaiming him to be ‘a new eminence in the history of the world’. Einstein’s research, it assured its readers, caused a ‘complete revolution in our understanding of Nature’...
eBook - ePubEinstein on Einstein
Autobiographical and Scientific Reflections
- Hanoch Gutfreund, Jürgen Renn(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
...C. Northrop (1893–1992): “Einstein’s Conception of Science” An American philosopher. His most influential work, The Meeting of East and West, was published in 1946 at the aftermath of World War II. Its central thesis is that East and West both must learn something from each other to avoid future conflict and to flourish together. He was the author of twelve books and innumerable articles on all major branches of philosophy including epistemology and the theory of concepts. Edward A. Milne (1896–1950): “Gravitation without General Relativity” An American theoretical astrophysicist. Milne’s early work was in mathematical astrophysics. In the 1920s, much of his research was concerned with stars, particularly with stellar evolution. His research in the 1930s was mainly concerned with the theory of relativity and cosmology. His later work, concerned with the interior structure of stars, aroused controversy. Milne was president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1943 to 1945. In his work Relativity, Gravitation, and World-Structure (1935), he proposed an alternative to Einstein’s general relativity theory, deriving a cosmological model of an expanding universe with an inhomogeneous mass distribution within the special theory of relativity. Georges Lemaître (1894–1966): “The Cosmological Constant” Alongside theological studies, the Belgian catholic priest Georges Lemaître pursued research in astrophysics, cosmology, and mathematics. In 1927, he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Louvain. As early as 1925, Lemaître worked on the application of Einstein’s general theory of relativity to cosmology, and in 1927 published a fundamental paper in which he solved the equations of the gravitational field without using Einstein’s cosmological constant. He developed solutions of general relativity for an expanding universe, as Alexander Friedmann had done some years earlier...
eBook - ePubThe Soul of Genius
Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, and the Meeting that Changed the Course of Science
- Jeffrey Orens(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Pegasus Books(Publisher)
...This would be demonstrated in real life by nuclear reactions that can, under controlled circumstances, generate energy for the world’s use via nuclear power plants as well as facilitate the tremendous destructive power of nuclear bombs. Eventually, Einstein was to recognize both possibilities, especially the weapons issue. During his later years he would somewhat idealistically urge the need to create an “empowered world government” to regulate the use of what he saw as the inevitability of nuclear weapons. 30 As in another age, when Alfred Nobel invented the terrifyingly convenient material called dynamite, the power of scientific invention was shown again to be a double-edged sword. At that time, Nobel’s remedy for his brainchild’s potential harm to humankind was to set aside a portion of his fortune as a prize, an annual incentive to support peace in the world. Never a wealthy man, Einstein could only offer his lifelong dedication to worldwide pacifism to combat the coming nuclear arms race. These final two published writings of significance from Einstein’s miraculous year had explored the special theory of relativity, which would be shown to be a subset of the general theory of relativity that he would develop over the next ten years. Relativity, in both its variations, along with the energy quanta proposal that became a precursor to quantum theory, would be seen as Einstein’s signature scientific contributions to the world. From the 1920s onward, it would be impossible to imagine the scientific landscape without the mention of one of these original insights that had emanated from the mind of Albert Einstein. Certainly, Einstein’s light quanta work was immediately recognized by Max Planck, an editor of the Annalen, and a few others as being extraordinary in nature...
eBook - ePubTeaching Einsteinian Physics in Schools
An Essential Guide for Teachers in Training and Practice
- Magdalena Kersting, David Blair(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...First, Einstein emphasised the field concept as a physical reality in contrast to the particle concept that is the main actor in the mechanical point of view. Although special relativity is not a theory which is based on field concepts (it is not a field theory), Einstein seems to have emphasised the need to modify Newtonian mechanics in terms of Maxwell's electromagnetism, which is a prototype of a field theory. Second, Einstein emphasised the changing of our viewpoint on nature through special relativity. This physical and philosophical viewpoint is mainly related to the spacetime continuum as an inseparable object. That is, spacetime is not just a name that can be used to refer to space and time combined at once, but is itself a single physical object. Third, Einstein wanted readers to understand the general characteristics of physical laws through special relativity. He emphasised the importance of simplicity 1 and harmony 2 as the main guidelines for special relativity and, in particular, the importance of the universality of the laws of physics by emphasising the term invariant, which means that the form of physical laws is the same for all inertial frames. What should we teach in special relativity? This question deals mainly with the content knowledge of special relativity. We found that Einstein wanted the readers of The Evolution of Physics to achieve the purpose of teaching special relativity through learning integral knowledge that has the whole structure and overall flow (e.g. storyline) of the theory. An example of a type of integral knowledge would be cultural content knowledge. The cultural content knowledge is a theoretical framework of physics content knowledge that considers science a dynamic human activity of the construction of tentative – that is, not yet completed – but objective knowledge (Galili, 2012)...
eBook - ePubFields of Force
The Development of a World View from Faraday to Einstein.
- William Berkson(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...A very important aspect of the influence, I think, was the rejection of absolute space. The reason for the great importance is that Lorentz’s ether was in the same situation as Newton’s absolute space, at least as far as quantities of the order v/c were concerned. When Einstein adopted the principle of relativity, Lorentz’s ether was in exactly the same position. And so Einstein sought a new interpretation of field theory which rejected the existence of Lorentz’s ether. To summarize Einstein’s view of the problem situation, let me use Einstein’s own account, from his autobiography (1948): 7 It became clear to me as long ago as shortly after 1900, i.e., shortly after Planck’s trailblazing work, that neither mechanics nor thermodynamics could (except in limiting cases) claim exact validity. By and by I despaired of the possibility of discovering the true laws by means of constructive efforts based on the known facts. The longer and the more despairingly I tried the more I came to the conviction that only the discovery of a universal formal principle could lead us to assured results. The example I saw before me was thermodynamics. The general principle was there given in the theorem: the laws of nature are such that it is impossible to construct a perpetuum mobile (of the first and second kind). How could such a universal principle be found? Returning to an old problem, the behaviour of an electromagnetic system travelling at the velocity of light, Einstein found in the principle of relativity the universal formal law with which he sought to build a new mechanics: 8 After ten years of reflection such a principle [relativity] resulted from a paradox upon which I had already hit at the age of sixteen: if I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam as a spacially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest...
