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When the World War II started, he wrote a letter to the President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in which he brought attention to the possibility of developing ‘extremely powerful bombs of a new type’. However, he was never directly implicated in the Manhattan project, and after the war he was a major opponent of the Atomic Bomb and its further use.
“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” —Albert Einstein
‘Ideas come from God’. It was his goal, as he admitted later in life, as a scientist to ‘read God’s mind’.
Albert lived with a family in Aarau, Switzerland and finished his schooling from a special high school run by Jost Winterler.
Albert Einstein was all set to become a professor of physics. He was also planning to marry Mileva when he graduated in 1900.
Albert always believed that his ability to think freely and explore new ideas would be the most important thing in his life. He had realized that even if he got married and had children, they would always come second to this ability to think freely.
A patent is a Government-issued document which allows an inventor to make and sell an invention, and prevents others from copying it.)
Working in the patent office as a clerk proved to be easy for Albert. He loved going over other people’s inventions and finding the flaws in someone’s argument. He would be interested in the subjects that people were working on such as electricity and energy.
He needed a lot of paper to do this work, however, and if anyone happened to walk by his desk he would shove his papers aside and pretend to work on patents.
Some of the greatest scientific achievements of the 21st century—electronics, the atomic bomb, space travel—were all Einstein’s brainchildren. He had suggested those in the papers he published while still working at the patent office. In the decades that followed, the other scientists worked on what had been Einstein’s seed thought.
In 1911, Albert was offered the post of full-professor at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague (which was then part of Austria-Hungary Empire). He took Austrian-Hungary citizenship to accept the job. In 1914, he returned to Germany and was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. (1914—1932)
With the Greeks in 600 B.C. there came the first Western attempts to provide a rational, non-religious explanation for how nature worked i.e. the sun, the moon and the stars. It was a moving away from the commonly believed mythology and seeking real answers.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) is thought of as the person who started modern science for he changed the role of scientists for explaining why something is happening to what is happening. The other change in brought about was to use mathematics as the description for natural phenomena, and experiments to see if that description would be correct!
Isaac Newton, born in 1642, discovered the basic laws of nature which are true throughout the entire Universe. Newton discovered the three laws of motion and the universal law of gravity, which states that bigger the objects and the closer they are to each other, the stronger the attraction in between them.
Albert Einstein made some significant contributions to the world of science with his theories. He claimed that light bends as it traveled through space. Scientists had always assumed that light traveled in a straight line and were quite baffled by his claims. But it took him quite some time to prove this theory.
Einstein suggested that light doesn’t just travel as waves but as electric currents. This photoelectric effect could force metals to release a tiny stream of particles known as ‘quanta’. From this Quantum Theory, other inventors were able to develop devices such as television and movies. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921.
An elaborate experiment was put together during the total solar eclipse when the moon would block the sun’s bright light from viewers on Earth. This makes it possible to photograph the light of the stars beyond the sun. He insisted that a study of those photos would show light bending as it passed other planets and the sun.
Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity brought a new revolutionary thought to the scientific world with the new conceptions of time, space, mass, motion and gravitation. He treated matter and energy as exchangeable and not distinct.
“Movement can only be detected and measured as relative movement; the change of position of one body in respect to another.”
In 1911, Einstein predicted the sun’s gravity would bend the light of another star. He based this on his new general theory of relativity. On 29 May 1919, during a solar eclipse, British astronomer and physicist Sir Arthur Eddington was able to confirm Einstein’s prediction. The news was published in newspapers around the world, and it made Einstein internationally known as a leading physicist.
In the 1920s, Einstein travelled around the world—including the UK, US, Japan, Palestine and other countries. Einstein gave lectures to packed audiences and became an internationally known figure for his work on physics, but also his wider observations on world affairs.
He would be driven insane by the question that was often asked by these reporters which was, “Could you briefly explain the theory of relativity?” It frustrated him no end since it had taken him fifteen years of intense thinking to develop the theory. But he would still take a deep breath, smile and say, “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But when he sits on hot stove for a minute—that is longer than any hour! That is relativity.”
On August 22, 1939, Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, explaining that it might be possible to build an atomic bomb. Einstein asked the President to provide governmental help for the study of the release of nuclear energy. Einstein also warned him that Nazi Germany might already be trying to build an atomic bomb. His letter helped set the United States on the long, difficult and rather costly path that led to the production of an atomic bomb. The same which was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and caused irreparable damages to generations living in those two places
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On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light, in which Einstein applied the quantum theory to light in order to explain the photoelectric effect. If light occurs in tiny packets (later called photons), then it should knock out electrons in a metal precise way.
On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat, in which Einstein offered the first experimental proof of the existence of atoms. By analyzing the motion of tiny particles suspended in still water, called Brownian motion, he could calculate the size of the jostling atoms and Avogadro’s number.
Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content, submitted almost as an afterthought, which showed that relativity theory led to the equation E=mc2. This provided the first mechanism to explain the energy source of the sun and other stars.
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” —Albert Einstein
Albert left Germany in 1933 because of the political unrest that had seized the country. Hitler named him an enemy of the State, and ordered his men to arrest Einstein. Peace loving Einstein could not bear to stay in Germany any longer. He gave up his German citizenship and moved to the United States.
