Albert Einstein

EINSTEIN THE GENIUS
As a child, Einstein was full of questions. He wondered why the sky was blue, why a compass always pointed north, what would happen if he could travel at the speed of light.
Little Albert didn’t quit asking such questions, and he also didn’t settle for the answers handed to him in textbooks — even though the answers came from such recognized geniuses as Sir Isaac Newton.
Einstein was born in 1879 in Germany. As a child he was never comfortable in the formal school environment. When he was 7 years old, he attended a Catholic School. Being a Jew, he felt like an outsider.
Einstein generally had trouble in schools. He found them too authoritarian, and Einstein was always very individualistic. He failed an entrance exam into the Swiss Federal Polytechinal School in Zurich and was forced to attend a technical school. However, some of Einstein’s difficulties as a student have been exaggerated. Spencer Weart. director of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics, says, “Einstein was a reasonably good student intellectually (people have dug up his old school records) but he did not get along well with the martinet German teachers of the time.”
“Myths have built up around his childhood, including a notion that he did poorly in terms of school grades. There's also a myth that he learned to talk late, based on a single remark by his sister, but it seems more likely that he just was not a talkative little boy.”
“Some parents would like to believe that their . . . child could turn out to be an Einstein and take comfort in the myths. On the other hand his genius was certainly not apparent in school. . . . In short, somebody seeing him might have guessed he'd turn out like his father -- moderately bright, but not steady enough to be much of a success in life.”

IS EVERYTHING RELATIVE?
Einstein was born 237 years after Sir Isaac Newton, who is considered to be the father of modern physics. Einstein, however, was so bold he challenged some of Newton’s basic assumptions.
Newton believed that space, time and mass never changed. But Einstein questioned this. In Einstein’s world, energy and mass were different forms of the same thing, gravity could actually bend space and the speed at which time passes can change depending on how fast an object is traveling.
As odd as these ideas may sound, they’ve been proven by scientific observation and are the basis for much of modern physics.
Amazingly, Einstein worked out these great thoughts while he was working 40 hours a week as a patent examiner in Bern, Germany. In his spare time, he continued to think about physics and to perform “thought experiments.”
What is a “thought experiment”? It is when a person asks a question, thinks of a logical answer and then proves it mathematically. This is how Einstein figured out his great theories of relativity.
In 1905, at the young age of 26 years old, he published four papers that showed energy and mass to be two sides of the same coin. What we call “mass” is actually a highly concentrated form of energy. Mass contains potential energy. If a person could break up the mass of an atom he could release energy. How much energy? According to Einstein, the energy a body has is equal to the mass of that body times the speed of light squared. An easier way to say it is E=mc2.
In 1916, Einstein published his general theory of relativity. In it he predicted that a ray of light from a distant star would appear to bend as it passed near the sun. In 1919, a team of British scientists was studying the solar eclipse and saw light rays deflected by the gravity of the sun just as Einstein had predicted.
Instantly, Einstein became a household name. He showed the world that Newton’s laws were incomplete.
Einstein is best known for his theories, but he was also an inventor. He held patents for a noiseless refrigerator, a hearing aid, and a light intensity self-adjusting camera. But even these contributions to society are not the things that made him great in the eyes of so many people.

THE HUMANITARIAN
The London Times had declared his discoveries a “Revolution in Science.” The New York Times read “Einstein Theory Triumphs.” Yet Einstein remained very humble. He even apologized to Newton in his Autobiographical Notes saying, “You found the only way which, in your age, was just about possible for a man of highest thought and creative power.”
Einstein was a Jew and an outspoken opponent of National Socialism or Nazism. When Hitler came to power in January of 1933, Einstein was stripped of his posts in Berlin. His property was seized, his books were burned, and a reward was offered for his capture.
Because of that, Einstein never returned to Germany. In August 1939, he and fellow physicists Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller sent a letter to President Roosevelt warning of new discoveries that might make it possible to build “extremely powerful bombs of a new type.”
This helped convince Roosevelt to begin the Manhattan Project, which led to the development of the atomic bomb. Despite his role in the formation of atomic weapons, Einstein was a pacifist. In the mid-40s he led other scientists in teaching the public about nuclear energy and the dangers of developing nuclear weapons.
Einstein also helped many of his fellow Jews escape the fascism in Europe. He worked to secure a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This happened in 1948 with the creation of the state of Israel.
His contribution to the Jewish cause was so great that in 1952 after the first president of Israel died, Einstein was offered the presidency. He turned it down, writing, “I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel, and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it.”

THE ECCENTRIC
In 1940, Einstein became a United States citizen, and lived the rest of his life in a white, two-story house at 112 Mercer Street and worked at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton.
Einstein was easily identified by his eccentricities, such as his tangled white hair and his hatred of socks, which he refused to wear.
He was totally absorbed in scientific problems, yet, he never understood why people were fascinated with him. He once remarked, “Why is it that nobody understands me and everybody likes me?”
Today, 45 years after Einstein died, that’s still probably just as true.