Albert Einstein was a theoretical physicist of international acclaim, a Nobel laureate, and most importantly, one of the most intelligent and influential figures in the history of mankind. Let us know more about him.
✦ Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg, now the German state of Baden-Württemberg.
✦ He was a student of a Catholic elementary school where he fared well. He exhibited a natural talent for mathematics, which led him to build mechanical devices and models. He is believed to have faced difficulties with speech during childhood.
✦ At the early age of five, a pocket compass inspired Einstein. On observing the pocket compass brought by his father, Einstein realized that it pointed in the same direction, whichever way it was turned. This made him think of the existence of a force that caused the compass to always point in the same direction.
✦ In 1903, Albert Einstein married Mileva Maric, a teacher from Titel, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Serbia. She is believed to have made significant contributions to Einstein's works. They divorced in 1919. Einstein is said to have married his cousin Elsa Lowenthal, after ending his relationship with Mileva.
✦ While working in the patent office during 1905, Albert Einstein published some of his important works in a German physics journal called Annalen der Physik. He put forth the idea of the particulate nature of light.
✦ It was during the same period of time that he published a paper, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Objects.
✦ The same year, in his paper on the equivalence of mass and energy, he proposed that mass can be converted into an equivalent amount of energy based on the equation, E=mc2.
✦ In his 1909 paper, he introduced the concept of photons by suggesting that energy quanta have defined momenta and are point-like particles.
✦ In his paper on Critical Opalescence written in 1910, Einstein discussed the effect of light scattered by different molecules in the atmosphere.
✦ In 1911, when he was a professor at the Charles University of Prague, Einstein published his work on the effects of gravity on light. A solar eclipse that occurred a few years later, proved his proposition that light bends in the vicinity of a massive stellar object like the Sun.
✦ In 1915, Einstein came up with the Theory of Relativity, which is in use till date.
✦ In 1921, Albert Einstein was a proud winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his notable contribution to physics in the discovery of the Law of the Photoelectric Effect. Ironically, he did not receive a Nobel Prize for his Theory of Relativity.
✦ Hungarian-German-American physicist Leo Szilard is said to have convinced Einstein, to write a letter to President Roosevelt, warning him of the possibility of Nazi Germany developing an atomic bomb. This letter is said to have induced the United States to create the atomic bomb.
✦ Albert Einstein died on April 18, 1955 at the age of 76.
✦ Before cremation, Einstein's brain was removed with the view of discovering the secret of his exceptional intelligence. It was later found that his brain contained a greater number of glial cells, which are responsible for the synthesis of information. It was also discovered that Einstein had a dense brain and a relatively large parietal lobe, which is associated with mathematical skills.
Albert Einstein was indeed a gifted human being. His death meant the loss of an extraordinary talent. He is held in high esteem throughout the scientific community of the world.