At the age of 16, discontent with the rigorous discipline of German Schools, Einstein departed to Switzerland where he completed his education. Having graduated from the polytechnic, he took up a job as a clerk processing patent applications at the Swiss Patent Office in Berne.
In 1905 he published three short papers that changed the course of modern physics and scientific history. The first of these papers dealt with wave particle duality, the second with Brownian Motion and most importantly, the third dealt with his Special Theory of Relativity (see below) from which he his known for his famous equation E=m(c*square)!
By then his fame had grown and after holding university posts in Switzerland and Czechoslovakia, he moved in 1913 to the Kaiser Wilheim Institute in Berlin. His interest then shifted to the study of gravitation and in 1916 he published his paper on the General Theory of Relativity, linking gravity to space and time.
Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 and Einstein emigrated to avoid the Nazi regime (Einstein being Jewish, he probably feared for his life) and spent the remainder of his years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton New Jersey in the United States.
Although he became a world celebrity mainly for his work on Relativity, he did not receive a Nobel Prize for it for some unknown reason (although someone suggested to me why that was so, but I won't divulge that:) and instead was awarded the prize in 1921 for his work on the photo-electric effect! Einstein spent the last few years of his life in a fruitless search for a Unified Theory combining gravitation and electromagnetism into a single set of equations.
Many of Einstein's predictions resulting from his work have now been proven true. For example, the time measured at the top and bottom of a large mountain are not the same, just as his theory predicts. To quote Bertrand Russel, "..relativity is probably the greatest synthetic achievement of the human intellect up to the present time.."
Born: Ulm, Germany 1879. Died 1955.
FBI Interview With
Albert Einstein
18
Photographs of Einstein
Einstein Quotes Page
(can be slow)
The Physics
Lover's Paradise -- MANY physics links.
Send
Email,Complaints, Suggestions.