Essay/Term paper: Albert einstein

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Biography Term Papers

Albert Einstein


Albert Einstein was born on March 14,1879 in Ulm, Wurttemberg,
Germany.He died April 18 1955 in Princeton,NJ.When Einstein was five years
old his father showed him a compass.He was very impressed by the behavior
of the needle of the compass,which kept pointing in the same direction no
matter which way the compass was turned.He later said he felt that "Something
deeply hidden had to be behind things".
After public school in Munich and in Aarau,Switzerland,Einstein
studied mathematics and physics at the Swiss Polytechnic Institute in Zurich.He
graduated in 1900.From 1902 to 1909 he worked as an examiner at the Swiss Patent
office in Bern.This job as patent examiner gave him a lot of free time,which he
spent doing scientific investigations.He became a Swiss citizen in 1905.Einstein
liked music also.He listened to classical music and played the violin.He
supported zionism and was asked to be the president of Israel when president
Chain Weizmann died in 1952.He decided not to except,saying that he wasn't right
for that position.Einstein was never concerned about money.Publishers from all
parts of the world offered him huge amounts of money for an autobiography.He
never accepted any of their offers.Einstein was married twice.He was seperated
from his first wife after he arrived in Berlin.During World War I he married his
first cousin,Elsa.She shared his life with him until she died in Princeton in
1936.He had two sons from his first marriage.He also had two stepdaughters from
his second marriage.In 1933 while Einstein was visiting England and the United
States the Nazi government of Germany took his property and deprived him of his
positions and his citizenship.Even before this happened he had been asked to
direct the school of mathematics in the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton,New Jersey.He accepted this position and he directed the school for
the rest of his life.Einstein became an American citizen in 1940.After he took
the job he moved into a two-story house at 112 Mercer St. in Princeton.He lived
and worked there until he died.
Albert Einstein is best known for his theory of relativity,which he
first advanced in 1905 when he was 26 years old.Einsteins theory revolutionized
scientific thought with new conceptions of time,space,mass,motion,and
gravitation.Einstein laid the basis for splitting the atom by treating mass and
energy as exchangable and not distinct.Einsteins famous equation E=mc2 {energy
equals mass times the velocity of light squarred} became a important foundation
in the development of atomic energy.Einstein arrived at his theory by means of
highly involved mathematical calculations and equations.Einsteins theories were
used in making the atomic bomb.He helped in it's making in another way also.On
August 2,1939 he wrote a letter to president Franklin D. Roosevelt,warning him
that Germany was working on nuclear fission.As a result the U.S. government
started a long hard work that led to the achievement of nuclear fission on
December 2,1942.This led to the making of the first atomic bomb in 1945.
Another one of Einsteins theories was his unified field theory,which he
first announced in 1929.In this theory he wanted to combine gravitational and
electromagnetic equations in a single theory.He published revisions of his
theory in 1950 and again in 1953.In 1949 he published his "Generalized theory of
gravitation".Einstein spent the last 25 years of his life working on the unified
field theory.In 1957 two men named Charles W.Misner and John A.Wheeler claimed
that Einsteins lastest equations demonstrated the unified field theory.
In 1905 Einstein wrote three papers for the Annals of physics.In one paper
he used the quantum theory to explain the photoelectric effect.He said that
"this effect takes place when light hits certain substances,particularly metals
with sufficient force to release electrons".The second paper related mass to
energy and yielded the famous equation E=mc2 which was used to work out some of
the simple problems of atomic energy.The third paper named "The Electrodynamics
of Moving Bodies" set forth the theory of relativity.A manuscrpit of this paper
was sold for 6 million dollars at a war bond rally in Kansas City in 1944 and
was later desposited with the Library of Congress in Washington,D.C.In 1909 he
became a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Zurich in
Switzerland.In 1911 and 1912 he occupied the same position at the German
University in Praque.He returned in 1912 to a similar job at the Federal
Institute of Technology in Zurich.Einstein was elected to the Prussian Academy
of Sciences in Berlin in 1913.